← Service Business Mastery for Skilled Trades: HVAC, Plumbing & Electrical Home Service
Service Business Mastery for Skilled Trades: HVAC, Plumbing & Electrical Home Service
433: My Website Review w Stephen Christopher from Wit Digital part 1
01:01:01
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- [00:07]
A
Hello, everyone out there in podcast world. Hope you're having a great day. You're listening to the Service Business Mastery Podcast. I'm your host, Terse Blesset. Today's episode is going to be a recap. This is part one of a ongoing series that we're having with Steven Christopher from Wit Digital. So basically, what's happening is he comes on the show and is reviewing our website and. And we're doing this. We're actually doing these recordings a month apart. But the first two episodes, we're just going to go ahead and release them back to back because it's been a couple months since we first did the initial recording. But it's really cool because I like the fact that good, bad, or ugly, you know, Steven's on board with sharing our wins and losses and successes and struggles so that everybody can see, like it's open book. As part of our agreement, whenever we first started working together was that we would share our successes, and anytime we had struggles, we'd share those as well. So that's what today's episode is, and I'm excited to share it with you, and I look forward to any feedback that you may have from this episode. With that being said, I'd like to welcome Steven Christopher from Wit Digital to the Service Business Mastery Podcast. All right, Stephen, welcome to the show.
- [01:37]
B
What's up, man? Good to see you, Terse.
- [01:38]
A
What's up, buddy? So you and I, we know each other very well. We've known each other for a little while now, even before we started working together. And we've had the opportunity now to work together and hang out, and we're gonna start doing this monthly podcast interview where we're actually gonna review our website that y' all are working on, which has been a really cool experience, watching it day in and day out. And then. So we're gonna. You and I are actually gonna break it down a little bit and talk about exactly what y' all have done to help increase, you know, the overall. The site itself. Because the site's not brand new. You're not taking something that you started brand new. You're fixing some stuff that was not done as well as it could have been performed over the past six or eight months prior to you taking it on. So you've had it for, what, about two months now?
- [02:34]
B
Yeah, somewhere right around two months.
- [02:36]
A
Yeah. So tell us a little bit, I guess, about what you've done and kind of what it's resulted in with our website, because everybody is listening. We've talked about, you And I have actually talked on the podcast before, but we've talked about just on. In general, it's a pretty common topic to talk about SEO and everything in ranking. But I haven't really talked about our website very much because I wasn't super proud of it, and I was getting pretty frustrated with the results I was getting, but I didn't know if it was normal or not normal. And so that was about whenever I reached out to you and decided to swap over to your services.
- [03:20]
B
Yeah, awesome, man. Yeah. You know, my goal, it'll be to just drop a bunch of value, give as much as we can to the audience, and help people make really good decisions when it comes to this stuff, because it's sure as hell not cheap, and it's something that can make or break a business. And so, I mean, literally, I just talked to a potential client earlier today, and the words out of his mouth were, I think I should have written it down. But it was pretty darn close to, I just am pretty sure, and I'm convinced that every digital marketing company are crooks. He goes, please don't take it personally. He goes, that's just the experience that I've had so far, and I've hired a bunch of them, and I can hear that pain in his voice. And so, especially for this first episode of kind of going through your process, I want to go through some of the basics, and I want to give people ways that before the SEO really starts making the phone ring. Because we all know, and we've all heard a hundred times, it takes four to six months, right? And that somehow just became industry standard a long, long time ago. And then that's just what every salesperson in the world says. Now, there is some truth to that. Four to six months, just based on data, based on just how fast Google will allow us to move a website up the rankings, and then also based on the fact that pretty much every major player in a market now in the home service industry has an SEO company. So that means that we, as a digital marketing agency, have to put in a lot more time and a lot more effort in order to beat out those other companies. So we'll go through some of these basic things to make sure that people know, okay, here's what I should look for in the beginning, here's what my expectations should be, and then we'll show some real, actual results on yours.
- [05:14]
A
Sweet. Let's do it.
- [05:16]
B
Awesome, man. So here's some of the basic stuff is it's so funny even when I say it out loud, because it's so basic, but yet so many times it's overlooked. So what I did is I went through all of our first one month one and month two kind of pipelines and pulled out the kind of the big bullet points of what it is that we do. And then I looked all through your account and I've been watching it over the last two months as our SEO specialist has been in there digging around. So we'll talk a little bit about the specifics of your campaign as well as just what we do in general. So first steps, ensure that all of your tracking is set up. So basic stuff, make sure that Google Analytics is, is set up on your account. Make sure that you have some sort of call tracking system set up that can be on your SEO company's side, that can be, you know, tertia in your case, you have it on your side with Service Titan. So just make sure that there's some way that you can quantify what's actually happening. And you want to quantify it or you want to at least get this stuff set up in the very, very beginning. So, so that now you have some benchmarks. Because, like, what we do is we go in right when we get an account and we go through this benchmarking process. So we take a ton of screenshots. So tersh, in your case, we have screenshots of like, what the homepage of the website looked like, what the interior pages of the website looked like, what did your Instagram, your Facebook look like? So we just take these screenshots so that we always know, okay, what did we start with? And we can always look back at that. And it's just, it's really helpful for us and for clients to see that. So make sure you have an idea of what you're actually starting with. And then the most important piece of that is tracking. So we use a call tracking system that we can actually track organic phone calls. A lot of SEO companies, unfortunately, will just swap out the main number on your website, the main number on your Google, my business, your Facebook, everywhere. They'll just put a tracking number there. And, and then when you get your reporting, it'll say, oh, SEO phone calls. Well, that's kind of BS because what about people that already knew the name of your business, already had your website saved, already knew who you were. Now they're going to go to your website and they're going to get qualified as an SEO lead. Well, your SEO company didn't do jack to produce that.
- [07:42]
A
We had that exact same thing. Happening where we were being told that we were getting all these additional leads and we were listening to the leads that they were talking about and it was exactly like you said. They were existing clients that just called. They looked us up and then clicked on the heads, the header of the website. And you could listen to it and you could tell that it wasn't a new lead, but they were swearing that we were getting all these great leads.
- [08:10]
B
Yeah, it's just not the right way to treat people. So make sure that you have your tracking set up. Make sure you talk to your company and make sure that they have something like this. Now, don't expect this on day one. It can take like 15 to 20 days to kind of get all this set up and get it tweaked. And so just don't expect it on day one. But just make sure. You're asking the question of how are we quantifying kind of a baseline of calls? Because we want to know over the course of the first few weeks, how many calls are you currently getting? So that then we can start to watch that as a metric of how many we're actually increasing it by. We don't want to take credit for stuff that we didn't actually generate. So that's step one. Make sure you got the basics set up, make sure you got analytics, make sure you got some sort of phone call tracking form tracking. So submission forms on the website. And ideally you would want to pull those in through Google. That can be a little more complex. Your digital marketing company should definitely be able to do that for you. But it just makes a nice clean place to get and look at a majority of that data. So that's what we. That's one of the things we work on. Then we move over to kind of the basics of SEO. So now we've got screenshots for what the site looked like. So now we know if we make any changes and, you know, Terse comes back and says, hey, you know, what are you doing? The homepage looks like crap. Well, we have a screenshot to say, hey, it actually looks exactly like it did before. We haven't even made changes on it yet. So we got all that stuff taken care of. Next we're going to do a name, address, phone number. You may have heard it. It's called like a nap is what a lot of digital marketing companies refer to it as. And what this is is Google likes to make sure that you are consistent across the Internet. The more consistent you are, they determine that that's a. You're giving a better experience to searchers, and therefore you're going to have the opportunity to rank a little bit higher. So what it is and terse, I'll give a free tool where people can go and just like, put in their business name, address, phone number, and see where the inconsistencies are. I think it does about 60 to 80 sites across the web. But what we do is we'll do a search and we'll pull up all of the biggest listing directories, the most important ones that's like your Facebook, Yelp, Google My Business, even into some of the sillier ones that maybe people don't actually go to search, but Google still uses it like white pages and yellow pages and super pages and all that jazz. So what we do is we run a report that shows, okay, every one of those that you have a listing filled out at what is. What's the name of the business, what's the address, what's the phone number? And we want to make those consistent. So for. Well, and here's where a lot of people get hung up. They're like, oh, well, what do I call the business? Is it Bob's Plumbing, LLC? Or is it, you know, Bob's Plumbing, or is it Bob and Mary's Plumbing? Because chances are you probably have all these different names across the web. Just pick one that makes sense. Pick the one that's on the side of your truck. It doesn't have to be exactly what is registered with your secretary of state. This needs to be consistent. Now, I'm not an attorney, so I'm not going to advise anybody on exactly what to pick, but it just needs to be consistent. So make it something that is pretty darn similar to your real business name. But you don't have to put LLC Inc. Or any of that stuff in there. So just pick a nice consistent name for the business, and then you want to make sure that you fix it across all of those different sites.
- [11:54]
A
So what about if you have like a tracking number? So like with Service Titan, we have different tracking numbers. It's. Is it bad? I guess it's bad to have, like, a Facebook tracking number that would follow Facebook.
- [12:07]
B
So there's a couple different ways. So generally speaking, the answer is yes, you don't want to put different phone numbers on different places because now that creates an inconsistent name, address, phone number, or nap across the Internet. Now, the caveat to that is a couple different sites like Google My Business, about a year, maybe two years ago at this point, gave an option to Put in multiple phone numbers.
- [12:35]
A
Oh, I did see that on my GmbH.
- [12:37]
B
What we do. And terse, you probably saw this on yours. We use a tracking number, but we put the tracking number in position one, and then we put your consistent name, address, phone number in position two.
- [12:47]
A
Yep. I didn't notice that. Yep.
- [12:49]
B
And people don't actually see the position 2 phone number. But. But that is in there. So that Google knows, hey, the nap is consistent. And then it allows us to track what's happening with your Google my business phone calls. Because as part of SEO, we're not just working on organic rankings. We're also working on Google my business rankings. The other piece for Facebook is Facebook. You have your general information in Facebook, which is where you want to keep that consistent business phone number. But what you can do is you can actually change it. So if your call to action on your Facebook page is click to call, you can actually put a different phone number in that call to action without affecting the phone number on your primary profile. So all kinds of cool little tricks. And this stuff changes all the time. So depending on when you're listening to this, it could be different. It could have changed, it could have gone away. There could be other sites that now offer something like that, but just double check and just make sure that your primary listing is correct with the matching name, address, phone number. And when we say matching name, address, phone number, better safe than sorry. Make sure that that matches. Like, don't have. If Your address is 123 Anywhere Street. On Google, if it's abbreviated ST, just use ST Everywhere Else. Don't spell it out everywhere else. It doesn't matter as much as it used to. But just better safe than sorry. Just pick one exact address and use that everywhere.
- [14:27]
A
Okay, cool.
- [14:29]
B
So we did that. So we went through. We made sure all of your listings were the same. We picked exactly how we wanted the name. We picked that in conjunction with you, obviously. And then we went out and boom, we made that happen across the entire web then. And these are kind of. These aren't necessarily in an exact order because we pack all of this stuff into the first couple weeks. So it doesn't really matter the order we do it. We just. These are the things that we want to get done really, really quick.
- [15:02]
A
Yeah, I remember, like, Luke was. He's who does all my stuff, and he. He was asking me all these questions at the same time. And so you could tell they were. Everybody was working on it together and, like trying to knock it out simultaneously almost.
- [15:16]
B
Yeah. Yeah. We have a little Team of people that work on it in the beginning to get some of this basic stuff cleaned up so that we can start to get results. Like, we'll show everybody here a little bit more towards the end. Google My business. So we've already made sure that the Google My business is correct with name, address, phone number. But you want to make sure that your Google My business is filled out completely. So what does that look like? You want to log in, make sure that all of your reviews are responded to. If you have any negative reviews, you want to make sure that you respond to those as well. If you have any false reviews. Google's actually been really good lately about getting those removed. Just make sure they're truly false. Not just somebody that was, that you came out and didn't do work for and they didn't like you. Like, that's a, that's a legitimate review in most cases. But you know, if you have like an ex employee that's just out there doing crazy stuff or just somebody that maybe put it on the wrong company, Google is pretty good about getting those removed right now. So make sure you've responded to all your reviews. Make sure you have the profile filled out completely. And that means make sure that you have a list of all of the services that you offer. Now, you can't type these in, but you start typing plumber and it'll show up as a category. So make sure you have all of those selected. Now here's something really important when it comes to that, more is not always better. So if you do these little side services, like, let's just say that you're, let's say you're a plumber and you've done one sewer job in the last five years. Don't put sewer on there unless you really have intention of going after that. And the reason is, is that every one of those categories that you put on there divides the relevancy of that category by that percent. So if you have one thing, if you do plumbing and that's it, and you put plumber, that's 100% of your relevancy towards plumber. But now if you put five total categories, plumber only has 20% really allocated to it. So don't go wild on it. Just pick the stuff that you really want to show up for. Pick your bread and butter and, and be okay with that. You can always change it. You can always add, you can always subtract in the future. But don't go looking for every single category that you might, that you might.
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A
Do does it matter what place the categories? Like, does the top category significant? Is it more important in the searches? Or.
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B
So we, we believe that it is a little bit more important. There's really no data on it that we're basing it on just what we've seen.
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A
So.
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B
We will put the most important category at the top because we have seen that have an impact. So I would recommend doing it. Okay, yeah, no reason not to. It's super easy. Then you want to double check and make sure that you have all of your service areas listed in there. So you can do that a couple different ways. We generally like to be pretty specific about it. Either like towns and zip codes or you can do a radius. You can do all kinds of different things, but we're pretty specific. Google launched the ability to target specific geographic areas about maybe six months ago now. And so we've been utilizing that and we like it. We haven't seen any negative from it, and we've only seen positive. So just make sure that all of those. And again, if you, you know, if you will serve a town that's 50 miles away from your office, but you haven't done a job there ever or in the last year, and you really don't care to go up there, don't put that in there because it's just going to end up taking away from the, from your primary service area.
- [19:16]
A
Okay, so if you want. So if you service, say a whole county, but you really want to serve pinpoint in that like one specific city or town, should you just put that town in there so that you're, you're super focused there? Or should you put the full county, even though like you service the full county, but you really want to show up for like one city in that county.
- [19:43]
B
So that's a great question and it's going to come back to testing. Okay, so what we would generally probably do is we would look and see how you have it set up now and how it's performing. If it's performing decent and you have a county set up, we're probably not going to mess with it a whole lot. We're going to do optimization on the site in order to try to push that up even higher. And then if we're, if we're unsuccessful, then we're going to make a change. So one of the things that a lot of SEO companies will do is they just come in and they kind of run their process and they don't actually take a look and see what's working. And this is actually going to Be perfect because it's going to lead me right into my next point. But yeah, just use the information that you have already to make decisions. Not just running this program of, okay, optimize every single page, make this. H1, make this meta tag, make this, make this. You want to actually look at the. You want to do keyword research or you want your SEO company to do keyword research? And then based on that research, figure out where you rank for those keywords, how relevant you are, and then start to make decisions on what to work towards. So in our, in kind of our next step that we did for you, Tersh, is we went out and did keyword research based on the kickoff call that we did with you. So we figured out, hey, what, what services are the most important to you? What service areas are the most important to you? And then based on our research and based on the data that Google gives us, we determined, okay, this is the top 10 keywords or our top primary keywords that we want to focus on. Put them into a rank tracking software, which, there's tons of it out there. There's tons of free ones. I could probably give a couple if somebody wanted them. And then we decided, or then we looked at that data and said, okay, cool. Let's just say, for example, that I'll just use AC repair or I'll use furnace repair because we're in the middle of the summer. So let's say that furnace repair already ranked pretty well. Like, let's say it ranked on, I don't know, the second or third page of Google. And when we looked at the furnace repair page, maybe it wasn't optimized that well. Well, there's a good chance that we're actually not going to make any changes to it on purpose because if it's already kind of ranking and there's a lot of other stuff that's not ranking at all, if we bring up those other pages, it brings the site as a whole up. And so we don't necessarily want to make changes to every single page right away. We want to use the data that we have to make those decisions.
- [22:24]
A
Okay, that makes sense. So to work on the things that you're really hurting, like if you're hurting on site speed, you know, work on the site speed versus if you have keywords that you're ranking really well with, just don't mess with that. That's that part of it.
- [22:39]
B
Yeah, yeah. Or at least the, that specific keyword. So, like, you know, our goal is if you, if you have, if you have five services and we're going to try to rank the kind of the internal landing page for that service. That's what we want to show up when somebody searches it. So furnace repair or heater repair? In a perfect world, we wanted to go to that heater repair, furnace repair page. So we want that page to actually show up in Google when somebody types in that word in Savannah or in your area.
- [23:09]
A
Okay. So rather than the actual homepage, it would be the actual internal page for that repair. Okay.
- [23:16]
B
Because if you think about it, it provides a better experience to the end user. So they're more likely to convert if they land on or if they presented the link to the page exactly what they wanted. And then we just have to make sure that that page is highly converting, make sure it's got looks good on mobile, got a click to call on it, those types of things.
- [23:36]
A
Okay. So is there, there are a way to track that it is convertible? Like it's one. How do you know if it is good or if it's bad? Like what's it, what's it called and what's it. How's that test performed?
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B
Like the website itself?
- [23:53]
A
Yeah. So it's like your landing page is a good landing page, internal, it's ranking high, but then it's not convertible. How do you know that it's not convertible?
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B
So there's not a real simple way to do it. We run so for all of our clients, every three months we run a website audit on it. And that's done by our design team and our development team. So they run through this checklist. I don't remember exactly how many it is. I think it's like 20 or 30 checkpoints. And they'll run through and they'll actually, they'll test it on like all new current or all current and all new devices. So I mean, how often does a new phone come out? It seems like every month. So even if we built something a year ago, there's probably been 20 new devices that have come out. So we test it on all of those new devices that have come out over the last three to four months to make sure that it works. Works okay. Looks okay and functions right. Because we can't build generally we're pretty spot on but you know, we can't build for something that doesn't exist yet.
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A
Oh yeah, absolutely.
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B
So yeah, so we'll run through this checklist and then we'll make sure that it has the basics like for example, that it has a click to call probably the most the number One most important thing on a mobile besides, I guess, the fact of just having something that's mobile friendly. And if anybody's listening, it doesn't have a mobile friendly site by now. Stop what you're doing and go fix that right now. Because you're probably not showing up anywhere and you're probably losing tons of conversions based on that. So just the basics. I mean, go to the interior pages of your website on your phone and act like you're a consumer. Can you find what you're looking for? Can you easily call? Can you easily find a contact? Can you find a form to fill out if you don't want to call? Just really basic stuff. I mean, just think about it from a consumer standpoint.
- [25:48]
A
Yeah. So many times we're guilty of being so deep in the weeds that we forget to look at it from their point of view, the consumer's point of view.
- [25:57]
B
Yeah, we, you know, terse, I don't think we've really experienced this with you, but sometimes, especially when we bring on new clients, they, they've been burned by SEO companies so many times that they want to get their money's worth and they're sending us all kinds of stuff like, oh, man, can you change that and update that and change that picture and change that header and change that? And we have to come back and say, okay, hold on. You hired us to get your site more traffic, to rank higher in search, to be more relevant in the eyes of Google, so that you can get more customers. This stuff that you're asking us to do, these are like little marketing checklists. Now we don't mind doing some of that within our SEO packages, but if we just focus on that, you're wasting your money. Just go hire a developer or off of Craigslist and have them implement the exact stuff that you want. You're paying us for our knowledge and expertise, so you want to communicate a lot with your SEO company. But you shouldn't be the driver in what's going on. You shouldn't. You should be, you know, the passenger and the navigator helping, kind of say, hey, like, I want to go over there. How do we get there? Okay, let's do that.
- [27:10]
A
It's funny you mentioned that because like I mentioned to Luke that I was lsa, I was curious about it and all that. And then 30 minutes later, maybe an hour, he was like, hey, let's hop on a call together, a zoom call. And I want to introduce you to Matt. He's like the expert when it comes to that kind of stuff. And I was like, dang, okay, well, let's. Let's do it. And then next thing you know, like, Matt's like, every other day he's updating me on, you know, Google Guarantee and all this other stuff. And it's, It's. I don't have to think about it. I don't have to keep it on the top of my mind to remind myself to double check and see what Matt's doing or Luke's doing like they are before I realize that I'm getting updated emails from them. And. And there's always some video saying, here's what we've done, here's what we plan to do, and here's the results. So that's really cool. It's not like once a month I'm seeing this information. I honestly feel like we've been together for like six months now because of how many times I've gotten videos and correspondence compared to what I was used to.
- [28:16]
B
Yeah, I mean, you, you know, shameless plug. Right. We spent a lot of years figuring out how to do that. And, you know, a lot of our onboarding process came from Joey Coleman's book, how to never lose a Customer Again, and creating a first hundred days experience, which I think for all of our home service company or our other home service company owners listening, like, that's important. Now, I don't know exactly how to work it into your business model, but what is that initial experience?
- [28:44]
A
Yeah, it's not difficult. And anybody that hasn't read the book, you. You gotta read the book, or at least research on the book, because it is very important that first hundred days after you gain a customer can make and break a lot of relationships.
- [29:00]
B
Yeah, completely. So, yeah, we put a lot into those getting that experience in the beginning because we know most of our new clients have come from somewhere where they didn't get communicated with. They didn't know what was going on. Felt like a number. And we, we made it a huge priority to address that part.
- [29:21]
A
Yeah, you can definitely tell for sure.
- [29:23]
B
Cool. Awesome, man. I'll pass it along to him. I'll tell him you gave him some kudos.
- [29:28]
A
Yeah, absolutely. And it was. I mean, it was. It was cool because, I mean, the first couple of times I was like, dang, this is really cool. So I even, like shot a video back to Luke and he was like, oh, that's weird.
- [29:39]
B
Oh, yeah. No, he loved that. He said he actually sent it out to the whole office. He was like, does this happen a lot? He was like, I just got a Video back from a client. This was the greatest thing ever.
- [29:48]
A
Yeah, yeah, it's funny.
- [29:50]
B
He loved it.
- [29:51]
A
Cool.
- [29:52]
B
So, okay. Kind of tying up on the keyword research and ranking. Just be smart about it, you know, don't just. And I'm trying to make sure, I'm talking to, you know, to the audience. Make sure that your SEO company has a plan and it's not just to implement this, their standard thing. Make sure that they're actually paying attention to what you said is important. What towns. You said it's important to rank in what services. They should ask you the question. List your services in order of importance for me and list your service areas in order of importance. Because even if you serve five or 10 cities, but you know that a majority of your revenue comes from one or two zip codes or one or two towns, man. That's where the, that's where the energy should be going over the course of the first couple months.
- [30:43]
A
Yeah, I do remember that before I was ranking very high in the city that we were located, but the city right next to us, which was the larger city, the metropolitan area of actual Savannah, we weren't ranking hardly at all. And it was super low hanging fruit that we just didn't. We weren't even. We weren't getting any traction there. But in the small town where we were that has a lot of other AC companies, we were killing it there. But there's not a lot of houses there, which didn't make any sense to me.
- [31:13]
B
Yeah, there's not a lot of people searching for that city and AC repair.
- [31:17]
A
Right. So when they did do a search, we were like top searches, but that didn't equate to money in the pocket.
- [31:25]
B
Yeah. Yeah. Unfortunately, a lot of SEO companies will show you that. They'll be like, oh, hey, did you see Ranked number one and who cares?
- [31:33]
A
We're number one for a super long key to long long tail search.
- [31:38]
B
Yeah.
- [31:38]
A
And it's like, okay, that's a ridiculous search that nobody's ever gonna do.
- [31:44]
B
Yeah, I mean, we can, we have all kinds of data. I mean, I could show you tons of things you rank first for that are just completely irrelevant in life. They just don't matter. So, yeah, pay attention to what your SEO company's telling you. If it makes sense, then it's probably on the right track. If it just doesn't make sense, question it. I mean, hell, reach out to Tersh or reach out to me. I'm happy to answer questions and kind of give you questions to ask your SEO company.
- [32:12]
A
Yeah, totally.
- [32:14]
B
So I'll show this. Let's see. Do I want to show this right now? Actually, I'm going to talk about one other thing first and then I'm going to show something. So site speed was something else that we identified as something we needed to work on in your specific site ter. So we go through these checklists, we figure out what's working okay, what's working well, and then what's really holding us back, and then we'll kind of start working on that stuff that's really holding us back first and then start working on other things. So we don't have one kind of exact system that we do with every client. We treat everyone a little bit different based on what are the needs, what are, what is their specific situation, et cetera, et cetera. So Sites Feed was one of the ones with yours. Because we didn't build the site, we inherited this site from somebody else. And when we took it on, thanks to these handy dandy screenshots that we take in the very beginning. So we have all this data. You were loading it like eight seconds. Well, ideally we like to be in the two to three second range and we are for the sites that we're building. A lot of our sites now are actually under two seconds when it comes to load time. But so you were at like eight seconds, which that can start to not only impact SEO rankings, but when you think about it from a standpoint of conversions, that can have a big impact on conversions because somebody pulls the site up on their mobile device and it takes a couple seconds to load, they're gone, they're like, oh man, doesn't work. Go to the next one. So site speed is not only important for SEO, it's important for conversion too. So what we did is we had our dev team, our developers, our development team work on this a little bit and now we're down to around the 5 second range, so we're still a little bit high. Keeping in mind that we didn't build the site, what we did is we got it down as low as we could with some of the lowest hanging fruit items and then dropped it by about three seconds. And then we kind of circled back to some other things that we, we needed to work on that were more important. And then we'll come back to, as you mentioned in the last update from our team, that we're going to be working on site speed heading into next month. So we're kind of working on these things in the circular motion. You know, we don't spend too much time on one thing, because then you got all these 10, 20, 30 other things out here that can be holding you back to where no matter how great you are at putting metadata and optimizing the content on the homepage, nothing's gonna happen because you got 15 things or 20 or 30 things holding you back.
- [34:53]
A
Yeah.
- [34:54]
B
So site speed was one for you that we at least just needed to get it loading a little bit faster.
- [34:59]
A
And so with site speed, what do you, what do you find is the biggest hang up on site speed? Whenever you're looking at somebody's page and you say, okay, well that's really killing the speed of the page.
- [35:13]
B
There's a couple things. Easy stuff is like the size of the images. So what will happen is somebody will go out and take these really nice high resolution pictures of them standing in front of their trucks and their employees and things like that, and then they upload it to the site right out of the photographer's Dropbox. And I mean, that image could be hundreds and hundreds of megabytes and just massive. And that's a big thing that slows sites down. And so just shrinking the image size down a little bit, which doesn't actually change how it's going to look. Because if you think about it, some of these massive high resolution images, you could blow them up to be the size of like a poster or like a 72 inch TV and you don't need something that big. So you can get just as high resolution by making the picture a little bit smaller, save a ton of space, and then get an increased load speed. If you have a bunch of videos like it's kind of the cool thing right now to put video in your hero image on the site. Well, that's okay, but you have to make sure that the video is compressed. Your developer has figured out a couple different ways based on however your site's built to make that load really, really quick.
- [36:36]
A
You said a hero image. What, what are you talking about when you refer to hero image?
- [36:40]
B
So hero image is going to be. So pretty much most websites that you pull up, especially in the home service industry, you pull them up, they're gonna have a menu on the top, some contact information, and then right down below that, you're gonna have this big pretty picture. Or, you know, well, generally it's a big pretty picture or video and then sometimes you have words over it showcasing specials. That's your hero image.
- [37:02]
A
So is the, is a video just as bad as if you had pictures scrolling there? Because I've seen that before. Too where you had like an image that scrolled like a carousel type thing.
- [37:12]
B
It depends on how it's built.
- [37:14]
A
Okay, so if it's done right then it's fine.
- [37:16]
B
Yeah, it's even. We hesitate on the videos on the HERO image only because no matter how much you compress them and how great you make those videos, it's still going to increase load time a little bit. So again, it's this whole non perfect methodology or non perfect solution across all sites. It's going to be different for each. So one site we might build that is to fit their brand. It's a lot smaller and more compact so we have a little bit more room. So a video and the HERO image is going to be fine. On another site where we have this really big long homepage with a bunch of stuff that the client wants is, and maybe some, a lot of images on the homepage that's we're already going to have some programming issues or some programming challenges to get that really loading right. So putting a video in the HERO image is going to make it that much harder.
- [38:14]
A
So do we want the homepage to be as little detail as possible, like get them off the homepage onto like the internal page as fast as possible?
- [38:23]
B
Not necessarily. I mean, so we've been building sites for home service industry for a long time and we accidentally kind of messed ourselves up a few years ago where what we did is we made the homepages. So we put all this heat mapping software and user video recording software on a bunch of sites and we figured out, okay, here's the things that people feel are important in order to make a decision. And we basically started building homepages that would make it to where they never left the homepage. Well, that's great, right? In theory. Now we just made a homepage that converts really, really quickly. So we increased conversion rate. Well, what we accidentally did is we also increased bounce rate on the site because they never went to any other pages. So bounce rate is basically when you go to a page, stay for a short time or don't take a lot of action and then you exit on that same page. So what happened is we made it to where we could build brand trust. We answered the questions of like, you know, how fast can you get there? Do you serve my area? And can I trust you? We answered those really high up on the page and then we made it easy for them to either call or fill out a form. So they were doing this and they were leaving. And so we increased bounce rate. But fortunately we were able to make it work out okay, but it was like an accidental.
- [39:48]
A
So you want them to stay on the homepage for a little bit, but not too long. But it's a moving bar, moving target constantly, like, and then you want them to go to an internal page but, you know, not bounce from there too fast, potentially.
- [40:02]
B
I mean, everything we build is based around how fast can we get somebody to convert, how can we increase conversion rate? So that's our. That's our design and development team's objective. And then they'll get something that converts really well, and they'll hand it to our SEO team and say, okay, you guys figure out how to make it rank even though it converts really well.
- [40:24]
A
Yeah, it's like a catch 22. Yeah, yeah.
- [40:27]
B
So we're just always working on both.
- [40:29]
A
Yeah, test, test, test.
- [40:31]
B
Exactly. So that's okay. So site speed was one of the things that we worked on for you. And then after we did that, we went through and we identified, okay, what keywords kind of rank okay, and what pages do we need to work on first? So what pages do we need to go through and do basic optimization on, which I won't get into too much of the details. I will use some industry terms, so if people have questions about what these means, I can answer them. But we went through the primary pages that needed assistance that weren't ranking well. We optimized those with basic SEO. So, like the meta title, which. That's what shows up in the little browser tab at the top of your browser. It's that word, if you hover over it, or that phrase, that's your meta title, meta descriptions, and then different header tags throughout those pages. And then we would optimize the content. So you want to make sure that the content of a page has a few instances of the keyword that you're really wanting to rank that page for. And then secondarily, without getting too complex, as opposed to just making that page rank for what you do want it to rank for. You want to make sure that you don't have two or three other pages that have similar optimization for that exact same keyword. Because now it's called cannibalization. Google will crawl the whole site and say, okay, I don't know. I don't get it. You got three pages here that are all trying to rank for AC Repair Savannah, and they're all equally optimized for it. Look, if you don't know what page you want to rank for AC Repair Savannah, neither do we. We're just not going to rank you for it. So we do that initially in the SEO and then that's something that we're just constantly doing because out of the blue one day somebody or a page will just cannibalize a ranking for a keyword. That may be the, the homepage has been ranking for, for a year really. And it's just Google's algorithm constantly tweaking and constantly changing. So if that happens, we'll let it sit for a week or two. A lot of times it'll just drop off and everything's fine. Sometimes after that it doesn't actually change. So what we do is we have to go in and de. Optimize the other page even more. So we have to like take off some of the keywords so that now Google will push that other page back up to the top.
- [42:56]
A
Okay. Yeah, so sometimes you're too good at your job.
- [43:00]
B
Yeah. So really those are the things. Now there's some other stuff like you know, content creation and some of the basic optimization like adding alt tags to images, making sure pages have images, stuff like that that we've worked on here in the first couple months.
- [43:18]
A
The.
- [43:19]
B
And so I will show. So for anybody that's. For anybody that's actually watching it. Mm, you'll see what I'm about to show. And for anybody that is not watching it, I'm going to.
- [43:31]
A
We'll describe it the best way we can.
- [43:34]
B
Yeah, where's my.
- [43:40]
A
So the alt images, do they really make a difference? Do they need to be a keyword or is it okay if they're like very specific of what the actual image is?
- [43:48]
B
It should be, it should be both. So like for example, if you're on the page, you're optimizing for AC repair Savannah and you have a picture of an AC unit that should say. And somebody working on it that should say, ben doing AC repair in Savannah.
- [44:03]
A
Okay, cool. All right.
- [44:07]
B
Yeah, don't be afraid to, you know, make the optimization a little bit friendly to SEO. Don't over use keywords, but also don't, don't miss the opportunity to optimize a page and an image for a keyword.
- [44:27]
A
Gotcha.
- [44:28]
B
Alright, so for those of you watching, you'll see this. For those of you that are listening, I'll walk you through it. So basically what we did talked about in the beginning about how, okay, we need to figure out what keywords we want to rank for. We use some of the data, the traffic data that Google gives us and the recommendations from that data to determine. Okay, here's Kind of a. A rough initial keyword list of things that we want to focus on. So we start tracking that in the very beginning, generally within the first couple weeks. So now we have a benchmark of where we rank for all these, and then we'll. Then we track that forever. So what I'm showing is I'm going to show Tersh and Icebounds tracking for about the last 60 days, just so you can see kind of what's happened. So one of the things we do, which maybe your competitors are watching, maybe they're not, but we track out of all these keywords. So we have 66 keywords in here that we're monitoring so far. We also track, and we ask initially in our kickoff meeting for your top competitors, and we'll actually track you against your top competitors. So what this shows is that Icebound is winning against the other four competitors that Terse gave us in the beginning. So rankings in the top three. So number of keywords out of those 66 that rank in the top three, Tersh has 31 now and his second biggest competitor has 17. So I won't sit here and dwell on this too much, but it's looking pretty good in a relatively short amount of time compared to the competitors. Then I'll show this. So this is important because this proves that your SEO company is actually doing work that is starting to get results even early on, even before you start to get into that, like month three and four and then month four and six or four to six, this is how you start to gauge the progress that they're making before it actually starts turning into phone calls. So, for example, I'll read these through just a couple keywords and moving movement that we've had in the last 60 days. I'm going to use commercial heating repair Savannah. We're ranking 25th right now. Now, that's not that great. That's the third page of Google. However, in the last two months, we've increased that ranking position by 75 points. So, you know, you were a hundredth or more so off the top 10 pages of Google for that keyword. Now you're ranking on the third page. So even though it's not accomplishing what you're paying us for, which is to drive more phone calls, because nobody's going to go to the third page of Google to look for a company, you can see that we are making very good headway and you can kind of see that timeline start to play out. So if we're about two, two and a half months in you can start to see where that trend is going to over the course of the next two months. So just a couple of the keywords here for people that aren't that are just listening. Furnace repair service Savannah up 72 spots to 28. AC replacement service Savannah up 71 spots to 29. And the list is pretty legit as far as increases that we've seen and there's a couple that we've gotten onto the first page already. The other thing you'll notice because I just showed a graph with a ton of green, so a ton of increase. On the opposite side of this graph, you'll notice that we actually have some keywords that in the last six months or in the last two months we've actually fallen for in rankings. And you'll notice that some of these are the ones in your backyard because you used to rank really well for your backyard because that's what the old company had optimized for. Where we know that there's not a lot of people searching Pooler. So what we've done is we've told Google, hey, this is Savannah. We're pushing for Savannah. That's where the people are. That's what we want to rank for. What will happen is we'll actually end up losing a little bit of rank for some of these and this will trend back up as we bring the whole site optimization up over the next few months. But I just want to show people this because you will see some negative. You're not just going to see all positive in the beginning because as we're trying to prove to Google what we want to be relevant for, with all the changes that we're making, some things are going to become less relevant and we don't freak out. We just kind of let them, we just let them play out over week over week and we monitor them and then we go in and start to actually re optimize for some of those or some of those that we want.
- [49:28]
A
Yeah, the ones that you want to rank for. There's some that you. That you don't mind that if they fall off.
- [49:33]
B
Yeah. Even though, you know, even though I'm sure there's.
- [49:37]
A
There's a lot of houses in pool, but it's not like Savannah. You know, the population Savannah is a lot larger.
- [49:45]
B
Well, and the other thing too is even people that potentially live in Pooler may be searching Savannah, whereas it's probably not the other way around.
- [49:54]
A
Absolutely.
- [49:57]
B
So that kind of shows you some of the metrics that we look at as we're getting started and we're only two months in. So that we know, okay, what we're doing is working, we're making progress. Even though we're not seeing this huge uptick in phone calls this early, we know that that is coming based on all of the data that we're seeing. And so for anybody listening, that's how you can start to know that you're getting what you're paying for without having to wait this four to six months. I talk to people all the time, they're like, oh yeah, they just said wait four to six months. And then at six months they didn't get anything. I'm like, well, did you, Were you watching in month two and three and four?
- [50:38]
A
That's. That's exactly what was told to me. It was at month six, you should be getting results. Well, six came and I was getting the same like growth in numbers that I was getting in 2 and 3. But the phone still wasn't ringing, just like it wasn't in two and three. So that's. I definitely was. I knew something was up for sure. The site looked pretty, it was a very nicely designed site, but I knew that the SEO wasn't there. I speed tested it myself and that was kind of the straw that broke the camels back was it just, I mean, murdered it. And then one of the biggest things that it showed on the speed test was that I had no H1 tags on like two or three of the pages. And it was like main pages that say, how do you not have an H1 tag? Like, that's just basic. But. So that was really what drove me over to working with Wit Digital.
- [51:36]
B
Yeah, yeah. I mean, we're obviously, we're glad to have you and I appreciate the couple little compliments you've thrown out here and there, but, you know, let us earn it. Right? And that's what we're gonna do. So we're excited about actually getting the results. And I mean, you did mention that you're seeing a little bit of an uptick in phone calls from Google, Facebook.
- [51:56]
A
Yeah, we have. And so our phone calls before used to come a lot from Facebook social media, and now they're picking up and they're moving over towards Google for sure.
- [52:08]
B
Awesome.
- [52:09]
A
Yeah.
- [52:09]
B
So it just means it'll be that much more exciting in a couple months.
- [52:14]
A
And so we'll be doing this every month. And so we'll just track it along and even if we don't have, even if it's not great stuff. Well, you're still going to say hey, you know, we dip down right here and we're gonna, we're gonna work to get that improved as we go into the winter season and maybe try a landing page here or there and see if it succeeds or fails in the process.
- [52:35]
B
Yep, completely.
- [52:36]
A
We have the. The scentsy predict that we need to put on a page sometime and, and test and see what kind of results we might get, because that's new to the industry in general, so it's going to be hard to judge that one and see how it goes.
- [52:50]
B
Yeah, a hundred percent. I mean, you know, getting that up on a homepage, like on a banner on the hero image or something like that to test and see what happens. If it increases conversions, great. If it decreases them, then we'll come to you and say, hey, Tersh, this here's what's happening. You tell us what you would like to do.
- [53:09]
A
Which direction do we need to go? Yeah, totally. I get it. I appreciate it. I think I don't have any other questions. Do you have anything that you want to add to anything?
- [53:20]
B
Not really. I think we covered a lot of really important stuff. Biggest thing is ask your SEO company what's going on. I mean, take some of the points that we've talked about today with Icebound and just make sure you're asking those questions. If you're not sure what those questions are, you want to different ones, or, I don't know, reach out to me or Terse and we'll happily give those to you. I'm always open to talking about SEO and how it can benefit you. And is yours being done well right now or is it not? Tersch will tell you, and pretty much anybody else that talks to me will tell you that you'll never get a sales pitch here. It's like, look, if you just have questions, if you think they're doing a pretty good job, great. I'll happily take a look at it. Or have somebody on the team look at it and I'll tell you if they're doing a great job. Cool. They're doing an awesome job. Here's two areas you could improve in. Just go back and tell them and honestly give them a high five. Because just like you guys don't get enough good praise for all the work you do, neither do we. Neither do digital marketing agencies. And I know generally they don't have a great rap, but I'll tell you if they're doing well and if you should go back and give them a big old hug, because it happens. It happens enough times where you Know, it makes me proud and happy that somebody else is doing a great job in the industry too.
- [54:45]
A
Yeah. Bumping up the name rather than muddying it. Oh, dude.
- [54:49]
B
Yeah. You know, just like, just like Chuck with a truck. In you guys industry, you know, we got, we got. I don't know what they call ours. It'd be like Chuck with a basement and a computer. Yeah.
- [55:00]
A
There's no telling if anybody does want to reach out to you. Is social media the best way to reach out or.
- [55:08]
B
Yeah. So best places to find more information if you're just kind of curious and want to learn a little bit more about SEO and the content that we're putting out because we put out a ton of content. So our Facebook page is fantastic. It's just. ItDelivers is our Facebook page. And then the other thing that we have is we have a really cool little group. It's just for home service companies and we have about 500, maybe 600 owners in there right now. And that's a great place. It's a very safe place to ask questions about your digital marketing. We answer them and a lot of other people come out with really great answers about what's worked for them. If you go to Facebook, I'll give you the link for it. Terse. But if you go to Facebook and just search home service marketing, three separate words, that group will come up as one of the top ones. So that's a great group. Would love to have people in there too. Completely free. We do some lives in there and stuff. We'll obviously put this in here and oh, the last thing I will give out now and then I'll send it to you too. I mentioned that there's a scan tool so that you can put in your company name, address and phone number and it'll tell you how many of your listings are consistent or inconsistent. So to do that, it lives on our site. It's just www.witdelivers.com scan S C A N And that. Will you just enter your stuff? It's all. It's just a free report. That's a great tool too.
- [56:38]
A
Absolutely. I'll add all of that to the show notes too. So anybody that's interested. You don't have any excuse not to learn. For sure. Yeah, yeah.
- [56:47]
B
And if people want to email me directly, they can at steven s t e p h e nwhythdelivers.com you know, social media, whatever. It's. We're, we're not hard to find.
- [56:57]
A
No. And if you do start following you Won't regret it. I mean, the. The updates and the videos, I mean, they're. They're awesome. They're on point.
- [57:07]
B
Yeah. Yeah, we got. I'm actually right after this interview, I got to record something because Facebook ads just launched a new interface. So I'm just going to record a quick little update about that. And then there's something else that just launched that I think I'm doing a live on Thursday. Thursday or Friday on.
- [57:25]
A
Yeah, well, you just mentioned about your reviews. You had a thing recently about your reviews, dropping off and checking your reviews. Make sure you have all of them and all that, because Google's been super aggressive with their reviews.
- [57:39]
B
Yeah. How crazy is that? In an effort to remove false reviews from Google, my business, they. They accidentally removed real reviews from some pages, and they accidentally removed all reviews from a couple.
- [57:51]
A
Oh, wow. Nope. Yeah, that definitely wasn't mine. As soon as you sent that, I was like, I knew you had already checked, but I went in and checked it. I was like, oh, yeah, they're all there. So we're good.
- [58:01]
B
Yeah. And who knows? I mean, we. We don't. We don't know much about it, so hopefully it all happened in one fell swoop and that was it. But there's a good chance that that algorithm is still running and still deleting reviews. So, I mean, we're checking as often as we can, but we tell our clients, including you, like, tell us if you see something.
- [58:20]
A
Absolutely.
- [58:21]
B
And actually, that brings up a good kind of ending point, is your digital marketing company is a partner. It's somebody that you work with. Don't expect them to catch everything. Work with them. Tell them if you see something, they're not going to catch all of it. They're in the background working on getting you to rank higher, getting you more phone calls. Don't be the person that's like, oh, hey, like, I saw this one spelling error on this internal page that my niece wrote 12 years ago, and you guys didn't catch it. Like, just. Just remember, you pay a lot of money to have a partner with them, so make it a good partnership, and you will get so much more out of it.
- [59:00]
A
Absolutely. Absolutely. 100%. Cool, man. Thank you again for coming on the podcast and. And sharing all your information.
- [59:07]
B
Absolutely. Tersh. I love it, man.
- [59:09]
A
All right, buddy, I'll talk again soon.
- [59:10]
B
Okay.
- [59:12]
A
Thank you for listening to another episode of the Service Business Mastery Podcast. If you found value in this episode, please share it with your friends and family. Also, if you're on LinkedIn or Instagram. Take a screenshot of this if you're listening to it with your cell phone and share it on your Instagram stories, your Facebook stories, and tag us. My handle is at Tersplicit and and then WIT Digital, or it may be WIT Delivers, but I will put Stephen Christopher's information and how to get in touch with that team in the show notes. And if you have any other questions, don't hesitate to reach out to us. And also make sure you join the group. The Facebook group that WIT has, it's packed full a ton of content and they're super involved and super engaged. So I challenge you to join that group and be engaged and gather as much content as you can. And don't be afraid to ask questions. I think that's the biggest thing is don't be afraid of coming across as someone who doesn't know what they're talking about, because that's me in the Facebook groups. So thank you again for listening to the Service Business Mastery Podcast. The podcast focused on service business owners, managers and technicians who are considering becoming business owners themselves. We'll talk again next week.
- [60:47]
B
SA.