- Pros & Cons of SEO for your specific business
- Specific blog topics to set your content apart from the competition
- Possibilities of accelerated growth with paid search
- Actionable strategies to optimize your website
- So much more….
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Transcription:
Amanda Joyce:
Hi, guys. Welcome back to another episode. Do you ever find yourself asking if SEO is the right choice for your plumbing company?
Devon Hayes:
Yeah. Today we’re going to dive in and really take a look at whether or not it’s the right marketing solution for you right now.
Welcome to Trade Secrets, where we demystify digital marketing to help contractors get the most bang for their marketing bucks.
Amanda Joyce:
This is for you, if you’re a contractor looking for actionable marketing insights.
Devon Hayes:
Learn from home services industry experts to elevate your business through simplified marketing strategies.
Amanda Joyce:
Let’s dive into today’s trade secret.
Okay, so this is the first in a series that we’re planning for you guys, but we’re going to dive in on specific trades. We feel like this could be more helpful to you if we’re really applying it directly to your particular trade. So if you’re not a plumber, hopefully you’ll still find some use out of this. If not, check back in a couple of weeks and we’ll definitely be diving in on your trade.
So after all that, let’s dive in specifically on helping you figure out if SEO is the right decision, the right choice for your company. In all transparency here at Elevation Marketing, SEO is the backbone of most of our marketing strategies. Not always. But when we dive in and start talking to business owners we really like to help them determine if SEO is the right investment for them now, maybe it is down the road, but we really want to help you guys understand how it can benefit you and the questions to ask to help you determine if it’s the right investment for you.
Devon Hayes:
Absolutely. So it’s not often that we run into someone where SEO isn’t a great solution that fits for them in their long-term plans, but these are some of the things that we take a look at when we’re talking to you and figuring out if this investment is really something that you should be putting your money towards right now.
The first thing is, what is your visibility currently? How are you ranking? What’s your positioning? Some companies are so… Their brick and mortar is centered right in the heart of where they want to be doing business, and they are ranking in that local three pack without even trying. And that would be, the leads are coming in, they’ve got a backlog, their pipeline is full, they’ve got 30 to 50 leads a week minimum coming in. And so to us in that case, we would say, “You know what? There’s probably other ways or other things you could invest in right now.” So if that’s the case for you we, would probably learn more about your business and long-term goals and just say let’s invest somewhere else right now.
But on the opposite side of that coin, if your brick and mortar is in the center of where you want to be working and you’re not getting leads, you’re not getting calls and you’re not ranking, we would recommend that you do invest in SEO because that is… People are searching for your service. It’s something they need. They’re at the bottom of the funnel when they’re looking for you typically. So you want to be right in front of them when they’re trying to find you in those areas that you do serve.
Amanda Joyce:
Absolutely. And then I also want to build a little bit too on what you’re saying earlier about if they are currently ranking and they’ve got that visibility, their footprint’s right where they need to be, one thing that we do always like to remind folks is to take a look at the competition in the space. You might be killing it right now, but there could be some new guys coming up in your market that are suddenly getting reviews week over week. They’re doing all the things that we would coach a business owner to do, and you could sleep on it and turn around and be like, “Oh my gosh, now I’m trying to catch up in in a market I’ve always owned.” So you also don’t want to sleep on it, but there is nuance there. So maybe you wouldn’t have to do a really, really aggressive SEO strategy to make sure you’re continuing to maintain that visibility, but that’s definitely something to keep in mind as you’re deciding if that is in fact where you want to put those marketing dollars.
Devon Hayes:
And another question we get when people are deciding which digital strategy to take, they’re like, “Well, what about social media? How much time should I be spending on social media?” I have a friend and a neighbor that owns a plumbing company, and they’re like, “How many times a day do I need to post on social media? What are the hashtags?” All these things, but I know that they’re not investing in SEO and I’m like, “Well, what’s your expectation of the marketing effort and the time spent on social media? Are you expecting conversions and leads to come to you from those passive users on social media?” Passive meaning people that aren’t necessarily looking for you. Or is your time and investment, are you at a place with your business where it makes more sense to be targeting the people that are actively looking for your services?
There’s definitely, definitely a reason to invest in both. I’m not knocking social, but we’re talking to the companies that maybe you hired someone internally or maybe you have a little bit of a budget. You’re just finally at the point where you’re past that million dollar range, you’re 2 to 5 million and you’ve made it to your first million or two on heroics without any strategy behind your marketing and now you’re starting to think, “All right. Well, I know I need to spend 2, 3, up to 5% on marketing.” All in, not just on one piece of marketing, but where do you put it? So getting long-winded here, but talking about social versus SEO, passive users versus active users, both of those channels play a role, but what do you need for your business right now and what is your long-term expectation? What’s your short-term expectation of what your ROI is going to be on these different marketing channels? And that’s something to really think about before pulling the trigger on any marketing strategy, but I’m getting ahead of myself.
So back to the question at hand, “Should I do SEO for my plumbing company?” So I started that long story discussing the difference between an active and a passive user. So kind of social media versus someone searching on a search engine.
Amanda Joyce:
Great point. And another thing that I think is so important for us to highlight, it’s an analogy that our friend and business coach and recent guest here on the podcast likes to share with people to help them kind of understand why the part of the puzzle that SEO is, Matt Bertram, he likes to say that it’s the wind in the sails of your marketing strategy. So when you’re looking at it like that, we always like to coach business owners with a few of these nuances aside that you really want to start looking at your marketing mix and make sure that your website is really reflective of your brand. It’s in really good shape, and then you’ve done the work to make sure that it can be found by the leading search engines and that it’s going to come up when your core audience is looking for you. So he really likes to call it the wind and the sails of the rest of your marketing.
So if you’ve got that in place and you’re slowly gaining those rankings, like to your point earlier, Devon, about how it’s a long-term play, it takes a while, if you get that work in place and you allow time and the wind to catch those sails, then you can start looking at some of those more passive buys and invest there. And then as those people learn about your business, decide to consume some of your content, that kind of thing, then they go try to find you in the search results, you’re going to be there, you’re going to have that online visibility. So it can really help support where you’re spending all the rest of that money. So it’s one of the reasons why we oftentimes coach people before you start going down the rabbit hole of posting to social every day and expecting that to fill your pipeline. Let’s get that base in place, let’s fill the wind and the sails of your marketing with SEO, and then we can start dabbling in some of those other areas.
Devon Hayes:
The other piece of it, I think to make a case for SEO is if you are trying to be found and rank for higher end services where there’s a lower search volume, you definitely want to do SEO and make that part of your strategy because there might only be 20 searches a month. But if you rank number one for one of those kind of high ROI services that doesn’t happen all the time, but your front and center when they do happen, I mean talk about just a layup for your business. So that would be another case for SEO. I think we could make a case for SEO all day long because we love it. We just think no one can take it away once you invest in it, when it’s done properly and all the things we’ve kind of talked about before. But why don’t we make a case for why you wouldn’t invest in SEO? What are some reasons why a company would say, “Actually, it’s not for me”? Or why we would recommend maybe going a different direction? Let’s play a little game here.
Amanda Joyce:
Yes, let’s play devil’s advocate.
Devon Hayes:
Yes, it’s such a fun game, sometimes known as Poke the bear. All right, so you don’t have time to wait for SEO to work. That would be a reason for you to not invest in it right now. If you’ve got a ton of guys that you need to get out and get them on repairs and keep them working, you’ve got a crew of 15 plumbers and you’re trying to keep them busy, every day they need to have multiple jobs, the time it takes for SEO to work to see those conversions on leads, you might not have time for that. So if that’s the case, we would say you probably need the phone to ring, you should go probably paid media. And again, every business is different, but that would be a prime case for not choosing SEO as your first marketing investment.
Another barrier, depending on the agency you go with and their business model, there could be a high investment for the startup in SEO. We used to do an initial setup and it was done within six weeks and it was a huge investment. We still can do that, but what we found is more palpable to our customers is just incorporating it into a three-month startup period with just a regular monthly retainer for those three months.
But anyways, that could be a massive barrier to entry, because to really invest in it and depending on how much content you do or don’t have on your website, it could get pricier. If you have a one-page website and all of a sudden you want to invest in SEO and you have a whole list of services you want to target, blocked drains, broken pipes, leaking, toilet, all, you want to go down the whole list of the problem aware customers, solution aware customers, you want to go commercial, residential, you need to silo your content and you have nothing on your site, that’s where it starts to get expensive because part of SEO is building out content and content that’s useful to the audience that attracts buyers to your site. And if you don’t have any of that, well, it gets to be pretty, pretty expensive.
Amanda Joyce:
Pretty expensive, yeah. And to your point earlier too, sometimes running those ads out the gate is what you really need to do to just get the phone ringing, take the stress off you as a business owner, get your guys busy. And maybe you could look at it like months one through three you’re going to just focus on paid. You’re going to figure out what keywords are working for you and paid or what advisors are working for you, knowing that you are eventually going to want to focus on SEO, but right here and now in the moment, you just need the phone to ring. You need to start to see some of that money come back in, and then you can stop and kind of reassess. Because what we don’t want you to do is make the decision now, “I just need my pipeline full. I’m going to throw money at it. I’m going to buy those ads” and then you turn around five years from now and you’re still doing that.
We actually have a client and a plumber, a customer that services the market here in Arizona who was doing that. One of his biggest complaints about it was then year over year, he’s like, “My leads are getting more expensive and I’m spending more, but I’m not getting more business out of it.” And we were able to just get in and look at the trend line of the cost per click on those exact same service terms. Nothing had changed except there were more people competing for it and it wasn’t sustainable for his business. So those kinds of things can be a great short-term fix, but it’s definitely important to keep thinking. And maybe if SEO’s not right right now, you might revisit it three months from now and decide like, “Okay, I don’t know that I can see myself sustaining a $5,000 a month paid media budget forever and ever, but it’s going to work right now.” So that’s just something to keep in mind as you’re weighing all of this.
Devon Hayes:
Brilliant. Yeah, I mean, they’re short fixes for everything, but what is your long-term plan? And yeah, keep that in mind when you’re making these decisions. I’m trying to think. I think we covered… I mean, we covered it all. We’re trying to keep it short and sweet. Stay tuned for our next episode in this series specifically for plumbers. We’re going to talk about the 2024 marketing musts that we think you should definitely invest in if you’re trying to consider where to put your budget.
But do what we missed? Is there any questions that you have or any kind of pushback that you have against SEO? What’s your beef with SEO? Let us know. We would love to hear your experience with it and maybe why it did or didn’t work for you.
Amanda Joyce:
Until next time.
That was today’s Trade Secret. Thanks for listening.
Devon Hayes:
Did you find this helpful? We’re just getting started.
Amanda Joyce:
Subscribe and don’t miss our next review.
Devon Hayes:
Until next time.
