← To The Point - Home Services VIP Room Podcast
To The Point - Home Services VIP Room Podcast
The Contractor SEO metrics you’re not paying enough attention to
00:44:13
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Transcript92 lines
- [00:00]
A
Google is always manipulating things and changing things and doing different stuff to where, oh, shoot, I did all those changes, but now I'm ranking, you know, now over six months, I'm ranking further down than I was. Well, there's probably things that you've got to update, change, do different stuff like that. So it's a. It's an ongoing battle.
- [00:18]
B
This is, to the Point a Rhino experience pulled in one of the top.
- [00:25]
A
Home services, marketing and operations podcasts, cutting.
- [00:28]
B
Through the bullshit and getting to the. Hey, what's up to the point listers, it's your boy Chris with my main man in the white hoodie wearing his. His black vest, which. Which is exactly, exactly what he wore at our Redbird roofing Christmas party. And I, too, had the exact same thing, except I went vestless. So that way we weren't, you know, matchy matchy. But. My man Chatty Pete. Looking good, buddy.
- [00:57]
A
Thank you, sir. Just enjoying the bitter cold weather here in lovely central Indiana.
- [01:03]
B
I feel bad for you.
- [01:04]
A
Yeah, well, I was sitting here all alone by myself for the last 15 minutes waiting on you. And as I told you before we started, I will be blowing you some shit because you have been so. You and your main man Ryan there have been so gracious to put together a little highlight video of me not showing up, and now it has all come full circle. So here we are.
- [01:28]
B
I hardly think that you. Me being 15 minutes late and you missing more than half of the podcast last year is. Is the same.
- [01:38]
A
So what did I say? I said, I vow I'm going to be on all of them. We got some scheduling things worked out. I think everything is going to be good. I'm excited to be on, and we're going to get rocking and rolling.
- [01:51]
B
I'm proud of you. Yeah, you're like, hey, I can't miss the podcast if I just get you to reschedule it. That's brilliant strategy.
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A
Yeah, well, I figured year two, I can be a little bit more demanding, right?
- [02:05]
B
That's fair. Yeah, that's fair. I. I completely agree with you. Hey, man, I'm excited to see you here in a couple weeks.
- [02:10]
A
Dude, I am, too, because it is literally 2 degrees outside, and it's got to be warmer out in Arizona.
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B
It's freezing here, man. I woke up this morning weightlifting, and it was, you know, 40 degrees.
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A
Yeah, I'll take 40 over one. One degree.
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B
Hey, you're kind of being ungrateful right now, like you should. You should be thankful from a business perspective that it's a degree.
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A
There I. I'm very thankful. From a business perspective, however, my body does not handle the cold. I've never liked it. I don't like it. I'm not going to like it. But we will get through. It's warm in the office here.
- [02:46]
B
Hey, I'm praying for you.
- [02:48]
A
Yeah, I appreciate that.
- [02:50]
B
Okay, listen, we're gonna kick this thing off today. I mean, before I get into it, you know, I kicked off the last episode, you know, with some dad jokes. Right. Because, you know, I'm an exceptional dad joke teller. And just to reiterate from those who maybe I heard last week, but, you know, my daughter was so thoughtful in getting me this little calendar rip off the calendar. And it's got dad jokes because she said my dad jokes sucked, which is not very nice. I like to think that last week's episode I had some pretty good dad jokes. I thought it was a good start. So I got a couple more here, Chad, for you. You ready? What a rip. Okay. Okay, first one is. What do you call a fake noodle?
- [03:38]
A
I don't know.
- [03:39]
B
An imposter. That was a good one. That was a pretty good one. Okay, let me try it. Let me try this again. I thought that was a good start. Why can't you hear a terror? I already read it. Why can't you hear a pterodactyl going to the bathroom?
- [04:07]
A
I don't know.
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B
Because the P is silent. Hey, there we go, ladies and gentlemen. That's a winner. Okay, last one, and then we'll get to the point. Why was the broom late to class?
- [04:29]
A
I don't know.
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B
Because it overswept? No, no. All right.
- [04:38]
A
Yeah. The second one was the best one.
- [04:40]
B
Rude, but okay. The pterodact one. Okay, good. All right, well, now I can get to the point. This would be an interesting one because I didn't give Chad a whole lot of time to prep for it, and this definitely isn't in his wheelhouse. So we're gonna just have this conversation from my perspective and your perspective, because it's just the two of us, and. And I want our listeners to, you know, to, you know, maybe think about their questions, you know, they might have in this, or hopefully this answers some questions that they've had. And this is around the mystery that is search engine optimization, also known as S E to the O. Are you ready, Chad?
- [05:20]
A
Let's do it.
- [05:21]
B
Let's rock and roll. So, you know, the questions I get still to this day are, does SEO even matter anymore? Should I focus on it? Is this something I should Be paying attention to. Are they even doing anything? How can I even tell if this shit's working? Do these things sound familiar, Chad?
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A
They do.
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B
So I hear this all the time, and the answer is a million percent. It matters, and let me tell you why. So at the highest level, right? Here's why this matters. There's this search engine called Google, and in order to manipulate rankings, you have to do a practice called SEO, right? To make sure if somebody searches for furnace repair and they want that free furnace because they saw that promo on that Pier and Brothers website, but they got to get there first. Well, how they get there? Well, they got to make sure that that website pops up when someone searches for furnace repair. Naptown, Actually, that's. I wonder if you guys focus on that keyword now that I think about map down. I doubt it.
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A
Yeah, maybe. Maybe 10 years ago when it was hot, right?
- [06:32]
B
So, point being is it very much is at play right now, and you have to think about not only from a desktop perspective, you know, search looks different on mobile, version versus voice, search version versus chat, GPT. You got to focus on all this shit. And by the way, don't you want your shit to come up in the map section because people can find you easier? Map section. Well, guess what? That is an practice of search engine optimization. Running a good search engine optimization campaign can also help your paid ads perform better. Why? Because it can reduce overall cost per click. And by the way, that shit's expensive. If you have paid attention, it's expensive. So you got to have a really good SEO campaign. So what I want you to hear from this is maybe some things that you can use to pay attention to, even if you don't know. Know shit about it. You want to act like your marketing agency that you do. I'm going to give you some of those metrics that you can pay attention to or that you can ask them for to say, hey, can you give me some information on? Like, what are you actually doing that I'm paying you $2,000 a month for?
- [07:34]
A
Right?
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B
Like, because you want to know what the hell you're paying for. At the end of the day, the number one thing that matters to me is, well, what's it actually producing in lead volume for me? Like, what's how. What. What's it bringing in for me? So at the simplest form, you should be able to track how many leads are coming from an SEO campaign, and then you can see how you're performing on, like, Chad and I were talking about last week's episode. It's then you can check on, well, how well are we converting these leads that are coming from an SEO campaign? Wouldn't it be nice to be able to chase that all the way through? You can. And you can, you can, you, you can track leads that come specifically from SEO today, no problem. But here's a few things that you can pay attention to. The simplest thing is like, and Chad, this is something that I know, you know that you're not like dealing with this yourself directly, but you know this. The simplest thing is where am I actually ranking for what keywords? Like where are we actually at this month versus last month for AC repair, furnace repair furnace installation, insert, keyword or geography? And where was I ranking this month versus last month? And simplest form, like those are easiest things to look for, right?
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A
Yeah, I would agree. I mean, I think our digital team is looking at it on a monthly basis and there's a lot of useful softwares out there that you can use that can run analytics on your website and essentially just give you a checklist of things to either do on your website, modify so that you can rank higher for those things. So it's kind of a. I mean, I say this, I have not done it personally, but from what my team tells me is that it's pretty like cut and dry, like, hey, do one through 15 and you're going to rank higher next month than you did this month. And I think the important thing is, is you can't just. Hopefully I'm correct in saying this. You can't just do it once and forget it. It's an ongoing process because Google is always manipulating things and changing things and doing different stuff to where, oh shoot, I did all those changes, but now I' ranking, you know, now over six months, I'm ranking further down than I was. Well, there's probably things that you've got to update, change, do different stuff like that. So it's a, it's an ongoing battle and always will be, I think.
- [09:53]
B
Well, we have an open position on our SEO team if you'd like to join. It sounds like you know what you're talking about.
- [09:58]
A
If I can move, can I move to, to Scottsdale? I'll talk to Emily about it when I get home.
- [10:04]
B
I think she shot this down numerous times.
- [10:06]
A
Yes, yes, yes, yes.
- [10:08]
B
That's. That's our retirement phase. You are, you are right. There are lots of variables, right. And I. In the month, looking at it on a monthly basis is the right time frame. If you're trying to look at a week by Week, don't bother. You know, month is, month is the appropriate time frame. Because you don't know. None of us ever actually know when these rankings are going to change. Google still dictates all those things. Like there's still some chasing that we all have to do and figure out. Like we know 95% of the playbook, but there's the 5% of shit that we have no control over and we don't know timing. And there's algorithms, them changes that we don't know, that they're creating, that they have an analogy. There's a lot of that's happening that we just, we're constantly chasing it. So, yeah, like you have to be paying attention to your rankings because that's the indicator on, like, are we, are they doing good or is it, you know, if you move up or down one or two positions, don't freak out, that shit's going to happen. It'll fluctuate because you probably moved up on one and you maybe moved down on another or you stayed flat on one. That's okay. It's when you see big dips, if you see a big dip, you know, call it. Somebody drops, you know, six, seven, eight, ten positions. Like don't, maybe don't freak out in month one. If it doesn't rebound month two, we should talk about that. But a good agency is going to bring these things up to you and tell you what their plan is, you know, to, you know, to combat that. Because it could be that, you know, a lot of, a lot of the SEO practices is just testing. Like, you know, you gotta try new things. Like that's how you can win the games. You gotta try new things. So they might have tried something new and it didn't work, but they should be proactive in letting you know these things. So, you know, keyword ranking is the easiest tool that you can get to or the easiest report that you can get to. Just see, you know, how you're comparing month over month, number one. And a lot of agencies will tell you, you know, there's, there's, there is a lot of different keywords and keyword phrases that know we're tracking for you and they should be. So you don't need all of them. Otherwise you're gonna have like, you know, 20 pages of shit and you're not gonna look at all of it anyway. Maybe just pull like the top, you know, 20, 50, whatever you wanna look at, you know that you can flip through the pages real quick and just look at overall ranking like that that's the simplest thing that you could do. You might have heard somebody talking about this. Tommy brings this up. I swear, every time he introduces me at any conference, he brings up domain domain authority for a rhino, and he's like, oh, the las have the highest ranking authority on Ahrefs. He. Every single time he introduces me, he brings that up. So. And I appreciate it, because he's giving us some praise, you know, on the ranking of our own website. What he's talking about is domain authority matters. Every single domain. Your name, you know, ABC Heating, you know, Peterman Brothers, everybody, rhinoss.com. we all have domain authority. And the stronger it is, the greater the ranking. It's just another a factor, you know, and the ranking, you know, process.
- [13:01]
A
How do you check? How do you check? How do you check that? Like, if I'm. If I'm out there and I got a domain and I want to check to see how I'm. How I'm doing well, how do I do that?
- [13:10]
B
Great question, chad. So Ahrefs. Ahrefs.com Ahrefs is a. It's a website you can go to to check your domain authority. There's a couple others, but that's the one that, when I was saying, Tommy always, like, brings it up. That's the one that he's loyal to. But there's a couple of domain checkers out there that you can use. But that's one, you know, and then. And then what you can do is ask what it means, right? Like, go to your agency. And then. So if you're watching that metric and you can see it climbing, well, they're probably doing some things right. It should be increasing, you know, and things that can play into that are, you know, keyword, like, you know, how many pages they have on that site, you know, keyword density on the page, backlinking that goes to that page. Like, there's a number of things, but overall, it's all rolling itself up to domain authority, right? So that's like a. A top of the funnel metric. So that's something that you can look into. You know, I think another great thing is that. To talk about is people for the term bounce rate. When you hear the term bounce rate, Chad, what does that make you think of? It could be nothing.
- [14:19]
A
I believe it would be how. What is the time that people are spending on your. A particular page of your website?
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B
I am impressed with you, Chad Biederman.
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A
I was trying to think of something funny. Obviously, all that went nowhere. So. Yeah, I just figured I'd Give you what I thought it was.
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B
Hey, let's leave the funny up to me, okay?
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A
Because that's probably a good idea.
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B
Because while I appreciate it, and I really do appreciate it, I think that, that the humor side of things is better led by your boy Chris. Okay?
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A
I think you're probably right.
- [14:56]
B
Yeah. And the bounce rate is actually pretty accurate to what you said. It's, you know, who's coming into your onto a. You know, they click on it, they go to whatever page it is and how long are they staying there? Did they stay there for X amount of time or did they leave it really quickly? So if they leave it really quickly, it might indicate to the search engine that hey, we delivered a page that maybe wasn't as accurate of a result as we thought. So we will, you know, ding that by giving it a high bounce rate. Here's the problem I have with bounce rate for all that are listening. You can easily send someone to a page on your website and they find the answer that they need really fast. Because by the way, that is a conversion factor, right? We want them to make decisions fast when they get to their website. We do not want them searching all over to try and find shit, make it easy. What do you do? Where do you do it? How can I book a call? Can I save something, Can I finance it? Boom, really fast? Well, they got exactly what they needed and then they left the site. Boom. So maybe your bounce rate goes up, but I'll bet you, I'll bet you if your conversions are going up too, you're going to be just fine, right? Because they're finding the, that they need, but it is a balance, right? Because you do need them to get to that site. And if it's a metric that matters that impacts domain authority, you got to pay attention to bounce rate. But I'm telling you listeners, if you have a high bounce rate, 50% or higher or something like that, and your conversions and lead volume looks just fine, don't freak out, it's doing its job. It's just that they're finding exactly what they need on whatever page they landed faster and they didn't need it anymore. Because everything, everybody wants everything fast right now. Like everything's gotta be quick.
- [16:33]
A
Should you look at, if I'm, if I'm sitting there, should I look at like my homepage should have probably a higher bounce rate than maybe say a page with a blog post or something about that, where people are getting there and they're reading it. If I've got something where there's information on there and I see that page has a high bounce rate. Maybe I need to look at some stuff or whatever it is. But my homepage, like you said, we'd probably want that to be a little bit higher because, hey, they found our phone number and they found that we do what they need done. Boom. Calling them.
- [17:06]
B
Exactly. Yeah. I mean the, the game is actually we, we want them to find it fast. Like, you know that that is the game. So we were you bounce rate like a decade ago, maybe not that long ago was we pay a little more closer to that metric. But today it's like, yeah, man, I want them to find what they can as fast as they can. If that means they get on find it in 10 seconds and then bail or 20 seconds and bail. Like, I'm okay with that. As long as. As long as the lead volume or the conversion rate is chasing that bounce rate, we're okay.
- [17:36]
A
Yeah, makes sense.
- [17:38]
B
Yep. And sometimes when you're reading blogs, like somebody might go on that page and doesn't want to read all that. Like madhd, if somebody sends me two paragraphs, the odds of me reading it are very slim. Right. Anybody who works with me knows you can't send me two paragraphs. One, I'm already kind of in my pants a little bit. Two, I'm out. So I'm gonna bounce and go wherever I can to get the answer faster. So. But a lot of people are like me, Chad, right. So they don't want to have to read all those things. So they'll click out of that page and then go to something or try to find something different to get to the answer quicker. So. But this is what we had. Like, this is why I have a 30 some odd person SEO team, right? They have to pay attention to this for every one of the contractors. Like, because you do have to chase some of these things down on an individual basis, you know, per customer to, to try and, you know, pinpoint where there's a potential issue. So at the same time, you want to run blogs for people too, because it increases, you know, domain authority. If you get one that gets a lot of good traction, it could certainly help ranking factors. So moving on, the, you know, people used to talk about too, where they wanted you to go deeper and just like they want you to have to click on multiple pages in the site so you might land on a page and then never go to another one again. This is okay. Like it's okay to not have to go from into multiple page sessions. Like they might find Everything they need on that, on that one page they went to. And that's a win. You should be happy with that. As again, as long as you see conversions and lead volume increasing with it, you're just fine. Backlinks, let's talk backlinks. Everybody's heard backlinks.
- [19:12]
A
This is another Tommy subject right here.
- [19:15]
B
He loves backlinks. We just demoed our, our new ARC tool which tracks a lot of this stuff for all competitors. Like how. So Tommy wanted to see how A1 was doing and all his other in some of these other markets and some of the newer markets versus some of the competition and what was different. So our new little ARC tool that was built by our, one of our sister companies is pretty amazing. The owner of that company actually is a, is an engineer, built it himself, big SEO guy and basically wanted to see, you know, because they work with attorney, a lot of attorneys, how is one practice ranking over the other? Because obviously that's a super competitive industry as well. Very expensive, super competitive. Competitive. And he wanted to see, hey, how can I just run this in any market for any keyword and see what is impacting their ranking and what's impacting my clients ranking? So all the, you know, all the pages on the site, all the keywords per, I mean all the keywords per page or content per page, like all the things that lead up to domain authority, but also backlinks. Do they have more backlink than us? And if they do, are they stronger than the ones that we're using? It's just, it gives you the game plan. So we showed Tommy, Tommy obviously loves it because he loves talk backlinks and it is a big deal. It is a big factor in this game of SEO. A big factor.
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A
What is a backlink? So back right into it.
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B
Yeah, thanks for asking, Chad.
- [20:37]
A
That's right. I'm here for the people.
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B
Yeah, yeah, I appreciate that. And that's what a lot of the listeners are thinking as well, Chad. So a backlink is a. So I'll give you an example. You do some stuff with schools, right? Like you do some, some things with schools. So that school, you know, adds to their website a Peterman Brothers. You know, Peter, you know, Peterman Brothers is a sponsor of ours or Peterman Brothers a supporter of ours. Boom. And here's a link, you know, to go to Peterman Brothers. So it might be ABC School Edu, right, Because it's coming from an educational organization. So their, their domains are ABC School Edu. Instead of a dot com, it's dot Edu. Well those have very powerful, those are very powerful backlinks to come from anything that's edu a.gov, another good one. So those are like anything that's a government based organization, but they go to that page and they have a link that goes right back to your website. Peterman Brothers or if it's you who's listening and you do something with the school, get them to, you know, add something to their website and put a link back to your website. It's a link that goes back to you, a back link to you, your website. Does that help answer the question for you, Chad Peterman?
- [21:52]
A
I think you did a good job there. I think the important part, I think, and this is what I've got from Tommy is like there's a strategy to doing it and that is, you know, interacting with your community but being strategic about that. To your point, you know.govedu all of these are a little bit more powerful. The reason they're more powerful I think think is because those websites are vetted like not anybody can just go get a.gov website or a edu because they know they're a trusted authority. They have more, you know, weight in the game.
- [22:27]
B
That's correct. This is a quality, not a quantity game. So that's where we're headed is, you know, you can go out and buy 500 backlinks for a thousand bucks a month, but if they aren't valuable like trusted websites, they're not doing you any good. Actually they're doing the opposite because you're supposed to be an authority where you're trying to create your domain authority. Well, the best way to do that is to have other high ranking domain authority sites like a.gov or a edu that are high, that have high trust referring back to you because now they are adding to your domain authority because they're already a trusted website, which is what Chad's saying. So there's plenty of.com that have, you know, great domain authority, so that have high domain authority that you want backlinks from, but they're not all created equal. So it is important when you create a backlink strategy to not just go after quantity, go after quality. And honestly, it's a pain in the ass a little bit to go get some of that stuff because someone has to physically reach out to the organization to get that backlink. You know, like a perfect example with Redbird Roofing which had nice roofing company, we've had to reach out to the schools that we're working with. And get them to put our information on the site as a sponsor and get the link back to it. Like they'll put the brand, like the logo on there. But they didn't put the link back to us. So we had to reach out to them multiple times to get that done. So yeah, it could be a pain in the ass to get it done, but it's worth it because you can get that. You know, we need that domain authority. We need those backlinks links, those quality backlinks. Tommy loves backlink strategies. Like he loves to live in that world. I literally just had this same conversation with him two days ago. To me, authority after he did the ARC presentation from Mike on our team. So. But it matters that much and I think it's still a major factor in overall ranking. It's a big deal. It's a real big deal. So domain or, you know, backlinking is, is a big part of the, the strategy. Um, let's talk about errors. A lot of people will run, you know, every, I guess every digital marketing company has an audit of sorts that they can run, right? And keeping up with, like, whose audit means what is half the ball? Like, you get, you think about this. Here's the way I like to look at audit tools today. They're sales tools. That's really what I think a lot of digital marketing organizations use them for, is sales tools. How can I find something wrong with your site and then use that to convince you to talk to me, to potentially switch to my company because the X company is doing something wrong, which is not always true. Right. But it's more of a sales tool. Now there's value in these. If you actually understand how to fucking read these things, right, and get past the sales tool piece of it. But one of the major factors is if you have errors on your website. So if you can find an audit and they can show you errors and errors might be something like pages that are broken or links that are broken or. Or old pages that are still showing up that are. That are 404 errors. Like somebody didn't actually, like they got rid of the page but didn't get rid of the, you know, the domain still ranking somewhere in Google. Like those things impact your business negatively because it shows Google that, hey, while you have some really great content on this, you also have a lot of these pages on there, maybe five or six pages that no longer have anything on them. And. But they're still showing up in searches. You need to get rid of those altogether. So it's and there might be a 404 error on this. This happens sometimes whenever you build a new website and then don't bring all, all the domain extensions over to your new website. So which there's a forwarding process that we as agencies can do and people cut corners by not doing it because it takes time and those will show up as errors. So Anything that's a 404 error on your website that comes up in that audit, you want to get that handled right away. So there's just one little nugget. But from these audits, again, I ask you, all the listeners, because you're all getting audits, remember, these audits are sales tools. So don't always take it at face value. You need to dig into them a little bit. And then I want to just talk about a couple things. I was meeting with our, with one of our SEO managers today, just asking him from his perspective. I said, hey, here's the way I think about search engine optimization. I think about it in four buckets. I think about it on a desktop because the way you do SEO for desktop matters. The way that you do search engine optimization for a mobile search matters. The way that you do search engine optimization for a voice search matters. These are different. And the way that you do SEO for chat GPT and or Gemini also matters. Like, this is all the shit we have to think about is these four buckets. So, you know, how do. Does does you know, if you're saying, hey, I have an SEO company pursuing me, I'm going to say, hey, what do you have a strategy in place for for these four things? Like, what is the strategy that you have in place for those four buckets? And not that you need to know all the ships are going to do because there's probably a long list of things, but they should certainly have a plan for those four things things, because that's the battle now we're all fighting in the day is how can I get my customer to rank well when someone searches from a mobile device or, or a desktop or a voice search or, you know, even in chat GPT. So by the way, we're also figuring Chad GPT out. Like, this shit's still the wild west, but we're starting to figure things out. So we're a lot of a B testing, but there should still be a strategy for it. Like, I'm certain you guys have a strategy. Your team has a strategy going for chat GBD stuff.
- [28:06]
A
Yeah, I mean, they're looking into it. I think, like everybody, they're still trying to figure it out.
- [28:10]
B
Right.
- [28:11]
A
It's like, what is this? It's. What are we trying to do here?
- [28:15]
B
Yeah, I mean, we're doing the same. And it's like, you know, I kept, like I was just feeding Chat GPT every day, so I set a little reminder in my phone to do my own search in chat GPT and I would say, why is Rhino Strategic Solutions the best H vac digital marketing company in North America? Like, I kept asking it over and over, so I'm like, I didn't know if I was like, the way I was thinking about it was I'm just feeding Chat GPT their answer over and over and over and over again, hoping that it would. It would come up.
- [28:45]
A
Chris, let's, let's be honest. You're not feeding at that. What you were feeding it was who is the best digital. Who is the best looking digital marketer in the world hoping it would say your name.
- [28:58]
B
Well, that's actually, ironically, that was actually the answer that comes up. And I didn't even feed that. It just assumed it on its own. It was like, who is the digital marketing company founder that looks most like Justin Timberlake? Chad's favorite artist?
- [29:22]
A
Was a pretty good concert. It was.
- [29:26]
B
Thank you for that. I really appreciate that. You just made my day. Thank you. That and your very sweet LinkedIn post that you made about how much you love being on this podcast with your boy Chris.
- [29:42]
A
Yeah, it's a lot of fun.
- [29:43]
B
And if your assistant did that for you, thank her for me.
- [29:46]
A
She did not.
- [29:48]
B
I'm kidding. Okay, so you derailed me, but that was a good one. I appreciate you.
- [29:54]
A
Yeah, no problem.
- [29:55]
B
Okay. Last thing I got for us in this SEO world, I need to make sure I get you off to your next meeting too. Is the return on investment from search engine optimization is absolutely the end game of you paying for that service. And it can all be tracked whether they're typing in your name directly or they're typing in furnace repair Indianapolis, you can still attribute using a, you know, a pool. DNI pool pool of numbers that triggers when someone does an organic search you. It will trigger a unique call tracking number that's tracking SEO specifically. So any, any. We all have access to these pool of numbers to do this service. Right. It's just who has the team that can, you know, use the technology to do it. It's not difficult to do, but it's the best way to track the actual end result of it. So say you're like all that you just told me about. When I need to pay attention to, I'm not going to remember any of those things. I just want to know how it's performing for me. Okay, well this is how, this is how you can do that, is have somebody make sure that they're you, that they are tracking it specifically using a, you know, pool of numbers. So that way you know the end result of what you're paying for. It's no different than us tracking paid advertising is no different than us tracking OTT ads or that's tracking social ads. Like you can do the same thing just by utilizing these tracking numbers. So the thing that matters is, you know, organic, an organic search for your name directly is good, but you should be tracking it separately. Right? It's a, that's a branded search. Like, you know, you, I don't know that you necessarily can attribute that back to your SEO Legion campaign. Like we want the things like for, you know, furnace repair, furnace installation. Like we want to track those specifically so it can be done. So you got to be careful on making sure that whoever's reporting this stuff for you isn't just bucketing it all into one. Like you need to have branded and non branded. Like that's incredibly important really, in paid and SEO. But you can do that in SEO as well. But here's the deal. Nowhere in black and white, Chad, you and I have had this conversation before. Nowhere in black and white does it say that I've ever found anywhere, even in chat GPT. Because I asked that a good organic campaign can help your paid ads, your Google paid ads, or your Microsoft paid ads. But if you look at the data you have internally on our team, over across all these hundreds of contractors that we've run over all these years, I am 100% believer that a really good search engine optimization campaign can make your paid ad campaign perform better. Because what is Google's number one? Like, what is the number one purpose of Google, Chad? Like, why does Google exist? What is it that Google, what is their main product? What's their main reason for existence?
- [32:55]
A
Chad, Google answer your question.
- [32:58]
B
That's it, man.
- [32:59]
A
Fast and efficient.
- [33:01]
B
They want to be able to answer your question with an accurate response that gives you the information that you need right now. So, and they, if they do that, and they do it over and over and over and over again, you're going to continue to come back and use Google over and over again, which is what they've perfected. Like they have perfected that process. So you know, when they do, when Google does paid ads. Yes, it's numbers is half the battle, right? Like they want you to pay them, right? Because it is a paid service and they do make a shitload of money off their paid services. But part of that factor, I have to believe is quality score. The quality score of your paid ad campaigns, which a factor that goes into that is probably domain authority. Right? It's gotta be a. So nowhere have I read that in black and white, but statistically, when I look at data, there's a direct correlation to the two. And this shit's expensive to begin with anyway. So, like, yeah, if you're thinking, I'm just gonna run a paid ad campaign, this is why I, like, get heartburn when someone asks me to run paid ad campaign for them. But not control search engine optimization as I know it kind of. It can fuck me on two, you know, two different position, two different ways. So I'm always hesitant to do that because I got no control over SEO, which I know plays into the paid ad spin. So it's a dangerous. It's a dangerous dance.
- [34:20]
A
Yeah, well, and I think to your point that you said just a little bit earlier, I think it's important to make sure you're segregating all of your data. You know, a, A paid ad campaign can look really good, but you're supplementing what you're actually paying somebody to do to get you leads off of furnace repair. Well, if you've got a really good brand and your brand is driving a lot of, you know, brand searches, you need to have that segregated so that you can see that, hey, you know, the brand searches, I don't really necessarily need you to do that like that I did that on my own with, you know, my trucks and the TV and all of that. Already spent the money to pay for that. But understanding, you know, what is truly that, that organic, whether it's SEO or it's coming through on paid or whatever it is, but making sure that you have visibility into all of those dimensions of the actual data.
- [35:19]
B
Yeah, exactly. And like I said before, you can, like, you can track all those things. And listen, like, I think it's, it's. Hear him. It's still good to. You still want to track all the branded. Like, you definitely want to track it. So that way, you know, but when we're talking like a legion company, like, our job is to bring in new business, right? So you gotta track those things for sure separately. But. And I'm gonna, and I'm gonna pivot to one last thing. Chad, we were talking earlier about, you Know, bounce rate. Or you go to a page instead of bouncing off of it real quick, like you might find the, that you want fast. And then you move on. And that's, and that's okay. But one thing right from the jump is page speed, right? If somebody's trying to, like somebody clicks on, they do the search for furnace repair, Indianapolis, and they click on Peterman Brothers. Well, fucking Peterman Brothers takes five seconds to load. People don't got five seconds worth of patience. So it needs to load quick. Like, so page speed is important not just from a desktop, but also from mobile, right? So there's a number of factors. Like Google has a page speed checker that you can use to check your own mobile and desktop page speed, like that's a great voice of reason, right, to use the source. But that matters, right? And it's not like you want that thing loading so fast that there's no hesitation because people don't have patience for things. And by the way, even if your stuff starts to load slow, people question the validity of the site. Like, think about that. You, you know, when you click on something, it's taking a while to load. You either think my wi fi shitty right now or this web, this website's not opening, right? Like one of the two things. But it, you know, it's a risk of losing a potential customer just because the site's not going fast. It is. And it's an absolute ranking factor that goes towards domain authority. That thing has got to load and got to load quick. And a lot of it comes down to how is the website built structurally and are there a bunch of those 404 errors that might be bogging it down? Is the video on that site not scaled properly? So that way it's trying to pull a lot into that. Is it slowing it down? Is there big images on there that are slowing it down? Because it takes a while to load, like you. All these things are things that we're responsible as a marketing agency to make sure that are fixed. Like that way that page loads fast. So page speed is a big deal. I don't know about you, Chatty P, but I'm impatient and I want shit done now. And if I click on a page and I'm looking for something, if that thing does not load, dude, I'm out. I'm out. I'm finding something different.
- [37:55]
A
Yeah, I mean, I, I think, you know, all of the things that we've talked about, I think are, you know, I think about if I'm sitting here listening and I'm like, I don't really know what you're talking about, or I've never even heard of the backlink or whatever it is. I think the cool thing is, is all of this stuff can be tracked and the data is visible. That doesn't mean that you need to go. You need to know how to go find it. But this is a good kind of gut check for whoever is running your digital marketing. These are all questions you can ask. And as you said, they should be able to provide this. They have the data. Now, they may not be providing it because it's not great or whatever it is, but regardless of where it stands, at least it's a, you know, stake in the sand of. All right, how do we make this better? How can we. What's our strategy? What. What are we going to do to do this? And I think that you've given listeners, you know, a lot of things to like, hey, how's this doing? How's this doing? How's this doing? And at least, all right, here's where it is. Good, bad or indifferent. Now, how do we make it better? How do we keep improving it? No site is ever going to be perfect. You're always constantly working it. So. But at least you have some things to ask and get that data for yourself.
- [39:15]
B
Yeah, that's a, that's a really great point. And all we're trying to do here is just give them some things to, you know, to think. You don't have to understand it, but at least you have a metric that you can look at month over month to see is it doing better or is it getting worse. Like, you can fit. Those are easy ones to look at. And we'll put the stuff in the show notes, too, to make it easy. We'll point out some of those things I talked about. I'm leaving you with this one last thing and then unmo. Bail, because I know, Chad, you got to go because, you know, I was running 15 minutes late today. You know, I'm a big believer in making sure you have, you know, specific services on your site in specific locations. So if you run AC repair or furnace repair in Noblesville, Indiana, you should have a furnace repair page in Noblesville, Indiana. So someone goes to my. Goes to Google and searches for furnace repair Noblesville, they might not go to that home page. You're probably going to go to that furnace repair Noblesville page. And on that page is going to be how to book, you know, if there's a, if there's any sort of offering, if There's a finance offer. It's like, yes, we do it. Yes, we serve it in this area. Like, everything's on that page. So this goes back to my Bounce Rate comment. They might have found all that shit on that page, even though it wasn't the homepage, and got their answer quick and moved on. And that's okay. But I'm a huge, huge, huge fan of. You have a page on your website for every service that you offer and every location that you offer it. Because Google's number one thing is to connect whatever you searched for to the exact page of a site to give you the answer and continue to come back and use Google because patience, and because patience is something we all don't have, everybody wants answers now. So make sure you have on your website a page for every single service that you offer in every location that you offer it, and you can track all that. So, anyway, hopefully this is helpful. I mean, the point with some of these episodes is to try and give these guys more tools to look at, you know, not just, you know, from a operational perspective of running a business or growing a business, but also the marketing, because I really don't ever talk about it. So I appreciate your input, Chad. From your contractor perspective, no, I appreciate it.
- [41:21]
A
I actually have a couple of notes written down of things to check on myself that, you know, hey, how are we doing on this? What's our. What's our plan of attack? All of those things, which I think, you know, if you're listening, you're probably thinking, well, this digital stuff, like, this is so. One, I don't understand it. Two, I'm worried about 18 other things. But I think the cool thing is these tools are just an email away from being sent to the right person or the person who's managing this that can actually do something. And I've been living by this phrase of inspect what you expect. And I think that is so true. And there are so many areas. Whether it's digital, whether it's how we're answering phone calls, whether it's how we're dispatching them, whether it's how we're running the call, whatever it is, there's so many little things that can unlock so much value that we have to be willing to kind of take a step back and dig in to all of the areas. The trust and empowerment is critical in any organization. However, we still have to go back and inspect things.
- [42:33]
B
That's right. Listen, like, you get out what you put in to anything, right? Like, and this is one of these Things where you can be like, hey, this, I don't get it. Ignore it. And guess what? You keep on getting what you've always been getting. But like Chad said, he's a perfect example. Like, you might exactly be in the position he is. You're one email away from starting to figure some of this out or to hold somebody accountable to figuring this out on your behalf. So absolutely that helps. Hopefully that helps. So I don't think I have anything else on this one, Chad. Well, I'll let you get on with the rest of your. Your day. I apologize for my tardiness.
- [43:08]
A
It is all right. It will be fine. I will, I will take my repayment in being able to sleep at your house here in a couple of weeks.
- [43:17]
B
Yeah, I will. I will make sure that your accommodations are nice and tidy and, you know, a five star.
- [43:25]
A
Yeah. And my light switch works. Or I can operate it.
- [43:28]
B
The light switches Operator error. Okay. All right, listeners, hopefully this helps you out a little bit with the SEO stuff. And at the end of the day, like, listen, SEO is still very much a player and something you should be very much focused on and it's not going anywhere anytime soon. It's still the foundation of all things digital from my perspective. So hopefully these metrics helped you and help you get a little bit further down the path of understanding if you're paying for it, how is it actually working. And if, and if you don't know, it gets you one step closer to, to having a better idea. And if nothing else, it gives you some tools to help hold your marketing agency just a little bit more accountable for these types of things. So we named a lot of things again, I'll put them in the show notes. You don't got to know everything, but you got to do something. No zero days.