Because I've optimized our website and I do our monthly reporting and I look at our numbers on a monthly basis, 50 to 60% of the traffic that comes to our website is all from organic. All organic SEO. Welcome to jobbers, masters of Home Service, a podcast for home service pros, buy Home Service Pros. Today we're in Las Vegas and we're talking about local SEO getting leads from multiple service areas. I'm your host, Adam Sylvester. Today's guests are Cassie Allen.
She's the COO of Wheatley Creek Services. And David Brooks, the owner of Contractor Rhino. Welcome to Studio Guys. Thank you. Thanks for having us. Yeah, absolutely. David, why don't you go first, tell our audience who you are and what you do. Sure. My name is David Brooks. I'm the CEO of Contractor Rhino, which is a digital marketing and accounting services agency in the trade space. We are located out of Philadelphia. Hi, I'm Cassie Allen. I'm with Wheatley Creek Services.
We're a home service and residential cleaning company based in Granby, Colorado, which is a very small area. But before I switched into the home service industry, I came from the digital marketing world where I worked for the last 20 years in digital marketing. When I was in worked with agencies, I worked with hundreds of clients in the home service industry. Great. So lots of knowledge here.
Let's get into a little bit because a lot of our listeners, they have a pretty big service area and they might need to, instead of just advertising in Dallas, Texas for example, they probably need to start advertising in much more localized markets, big neighborhoods or certain parts of town. How can they go about that so that they're not just casting this really wide net, but they're casting a much smaller net? Do you guys have any suggestions on that?
Yeah, I do. When looking at your website, it is really good if you could implement a service areas page or areas we serve page. That way you can break down the different areas inside of your big area into smaller segments that you can target on your website so that you can reach out to people in those smaller but bigger size populations overall with targeted content that will be able to attract more leads into your business.
And we kind of took that a step further where we actually created pages for all the communities in our county. So that's a much bigger task. Now, I'm adding 10 pages to my website, but each of those pages targets a certain town, and what that helped us with is to start ranking for when people are doing searches for home service near me or with that local town, so home service near me, winter Park, which is one of our local towns or home service near me, Granby.
When you are doing that, even with Siri or Alexa, then you start ranking easier in those local areas and those neighborhood towns. Speaking of Dallas and you're looking to rank in Grapevine, you can have a page dedicated to Grapevine, Texas.
What we're going for, and our listeners who are watching YouTube can see this is gutter cleaning in Charlottesville, Virginia is our biggest keyword, and it's going to be here on the graph, but then as you go down, it's called the long tail and all these little pages that will hit all these smaller keywords. Each one of them is very small number, but when you accumulate all of them together, it's a big number.
And so what we want our listeners to stop doing is focusing solely on the big search terms and start saying, Hey, there's a lot of business out here on the fringe where we're having all these local SEO pages. Right? Absolutely. And I feel like if you go and you look at competitors, you'll see this, you'll see it probably just one link in the header, and then you'll see all the links in the footer, and it's all the location pages that they built out.
Usually it's not beginning like small business, a new website launches and it's like five pages, 10 pages. But over time, you want to build your website and you want to make it bigger. And as you are doing that, you'll start to see your competitors and you'll notice that those pages are in the footer and they've built 'em all out and they are going after those long
tail keywords. For sure. Yeah. What's the biggest mistake, David, that you've seen your clients make maybe doing this on their own, on trying to tackle this hyper-local SEO concept? What are some mistakes people are making? Some of the most common mistakes that I usually see is for someone if they're doing it on their own, trying to rank all those different major metros on the homepage.
So it could be Orlando, winter Park, Tampa, and they're trying to get all those big population cities just on the homepage, which it makes it harder for Google to distinguish what are we really targeting here? Is the primary preference Tampa, is it Orlando, is it Winter Park? And they're trying to really cramp in all those different services and things into one page for. Multiple areas. It really clutters it. The clutter is not good.
Your suggestion is to keep your homepage focused on one and then have sub pages that hit all these other cities. Correct. Okay. Why is SEO so important? Our listeners, I got bigger things to do, bigger fish or fry. What would you guys say? Why is SEO so important to the people's businesses? Yeah, I would say it's vitally important because it could be the lifeline of your
business. If you invest in SEO, you could have potential customers coming into your website or whether it's day or whether it's night or whether it's the weekend, even in slow periods when you're looking for more business.
By investing in SEO in a really good marketing strategy, it can not only help grow your business into one Pacific area, but if you're trying to cover multiple communities, multiple neighborhoods, multiple areas, by investing in SEO, you're going to be able to get potential customers in all those different areas. And I will elaborate that a lot of times when a new website launches, it's dependent on ads to get traffic to it, and ads are costly,
and it's not a long-term plan. It's a short-term plan. So you should be using ads and you can continue to use ads, right? Because you're going to add new services and then maybe you use ads again. But really what you want to do is save money on the ads and let SEO work in your favor. When you set up SEO, it may take three months to have a website rank, but once it's ranking, you're good.
You want to continue to build on your website and improving your SEO, but that initial spend on SEO saves you money in the long run. You're not spending that money on ads. And a lot of people say, oh, website costs so much, but it's really a one-time fee. You spend a big chunk of money on a website to get it. SEO optimized. Absolutely.
And then it just feeds the machine forever. And so it's really a long, I like your phrase there, long-term play because I think we can be shortsighted as entrepreneurs and business owners, especially in the trades like, oh, I can't spend that much money on a website, but you're setting yourself up for success for years down the road. You're not just paying this fee for no reason. You don't have to do a whole lot of changes to your website. Some, but not massive changes every year. One fee.
And then mostly after that it's done. And I'm sure David could add to this story, but because I've optimized our website and I do our monthly reporting, and I look at our numbers on a monthly basis, 50 to 60% of the traffic that comes to our website is all from organic, all organic SEO, right? So leads coming from Google primarily, and that was set and forget it right after I did that initially when we launched our website. And now that traffic continues to come in and that's 50% of our leads.
So I'm not worrying about the word of mouth and the social media and all those other leads because I have this solid traffic that's always coming in. And by implementing it early, you save yourself a lot of headache and trouble later on down the line. Normally, sometimes I see contractors and they come and say, I want leads tomorrow, and they think ads is that surefire solution that's really going to get it done,
but you really need to invest in organic. What happens when you turn ads off, when your leads go away and you can't refer back to the website because it's not optimized or it's not set up for success, and then two years go by and then three years go by and the website is still not SEO optimized. So like she said, she set it up correctly and then 50 to 60% of that traffic comes from organic. We all want leads today, but we also want leads three months from now and in three months,
today is going to be three months away. And so have to, I mean, short term vision on lead generation is fine. That's a big part of running business. It's getting leads today. But SEO is such a long-term play. We can't say it enough. Our listeners have to realize that having a properly built website with proper keywords, with proper locations and all that stuff, professional can help you. If you want to try to do it yourself, you can. It's worth every dime if it's done right. Absolutely.
How do we go about, one thing I've seen, and you guys have seen this before, is you go to a website sub page and it says that location like a hundred times. It's like Ville, and it's like, whoa, whoa, whoa. So is there a point where it gets excessive where you say the same keyword over and over and over again? Does Google will say, whoa, whoa, whoa, that's just too much. Absolutely. That's over optimization. Yes. Yes.
So it needs to read naturally. You would probably use a keyword on the page, what you see as a human, when you go to a website, probably three times you'd have in a title and then you maybe three times littered in the content. I say that and then somebody's going to think, oh, I wrote a paragraph. I need to mention it three times. That's not what I'm saying. You need a full page of content and then you can mention it three times. If you only have a paragraph, you probably mentioned it once,
it has to read naturally. And Google wants this too. It's all about user experience. The user experience has to be good when the user gets there, and Google is thinking of that too. So if the user experience is not good, you're not going to rank higher than your competitors, and you'll see that, and you can use tools to see that as well. Well, this is a great conversation. I want to pause for a moment to talk about Jobber specifically websites.
Jobber has a new website builder. David, why is having websites so important to Home Service Pros? Well, it helps customers to be able to find your business, find out about you online. If you're not online, you're nowhere. So you're just basically relying off a referral. So if you can do anything, just make sure you can try to get a website up that can post pictures of the jobs you completed, basic contact information, hours of service and the services that you provide. Yeah, Cassie.
So Jobber has this new feature where you could actually build a website from within Java, and it is super easy. I actually did it for our business, and it's a very small website, but what's great about it is that you can send it out to potential clients, you can connect it down to your Facebook, your social media channels, and clients can go and they can submit their information and the information is then put directly into Jobber. So it really makes that whole process seamless.
And you can have a website up by the end of the day. Yeah, well said. Yeah, if you're not using Jobber, you need to, if you don't have a website, you really need jobber. So go to jobber.com/podcast, steal, get an exclusive discount for new users and start building your website through Jobber. Now, David, 10 years ago when I started my business, or a little bit further back on that, blogs were all their age, are blogs still relevant?
Blogs are still relevant because they help customers be able to find your business when they're looking for their specific solution to their problem. Why is my roof leaking? Why doesn't my heater work? Why is it my AC blowing out hot air? So those different things can allow blogs on those different topics. Can the potential customers to be able to find your website, read the article, then realize that, Hey, I'm way over my head here. I need a professional to come handle this for me.
I agree. We still blog. We still do at least once a month, sometimes twice. It usually depends on if a new topic comes up or if we start getting phone calls and after five phone calls, we're like, that needs to be a blog post. Right. Now we're getting a lot of phone calls on what do you do? People are buying new homes and they don't know how to winterize their home.
They are buying in the middle of the Rocky Mountains and the snow is coming and the snow gets deep, and they're like, oh, wait, I'm not prepared for that. What do I do with my sprinkler system? And so then that's a blog post, and we're creating a blog post on teaching that moment. So blogs were the original content, in my view, back in 2001 or two. There was no Instagram. So that was the first version of content creation. What other forms of content help you develop this local SEO concepts?
I would say, I mean, podcast is one of the easiest ways. Video and podcast video is a little harder, right? Because you have to set up a bigger production in your head. You think that, but really your phone can video record you. But what's neat about a podcast and a video is that you can take it and then you can pull the transcription and put it on a blog and still have the
transcription below. That content is still being able to be read by Google, and you could have the local information put in there, the town information. That's the best way I've been able to see it the quickest way outside of blogs. How about you? Yeah, I think another thing that's often underlooked at is frequently asked questions. So maybe instead of turning a bunch of questions into a full on blog article, you may place it on your most important service pages.
So it could be roof replacement, roof installation, landscaping, and just a few of those common questions that customers may ask frequently. And then putting that on that page can help it rank higher. I'm also a big fan of pricing pages. I think besides about me or about us, I think pricing is one of the very top pages that people go to other than the homepage. And each business can figure out what goes there. We're not going to go down that path now,
but I do think pricing pages are really important. And someone might say, how much does it cost to clean my gutters in Charlesville, Virginia? And that pricing page will be at the top, and they'll click there, and then they'll click to the homepage, and now you're gold. And so I think pricing is really any other good ideas for pages specifically.
Another good piece of information is those community type pages, hosting other businesses in the area in the community, then putting driving directions from those places of interest back to your business, send signals to Google as local content relevance to your business because of the proximity. And those landmarks will actually kind of do your marketing SEOA favor. I like that. So we did something similar.
It doesn't necessarily help with SEO because it's a landing page optimization, but what it is, is it pulls people to the page and they enter their email address and then they get a free download. I call 'em big item pieces. It's bigger than a blog post. It's bigger, it takes more time. So what it is, it's our preferred trades and contractors in the local area. So it's service providers that do services that we don't do. And we got the idea because people were calling us and they're asking for a
plumber, and we don't do plumbing. They're asking for electrician, they're asking for snow removal. And so we pulled all that information into this download. And so it's a really great information because now they're not just getting their snowplow, which was their original question. They're getting pest control, they're getting local cabinet makers, and all of this is gold to them, and it's also building my email list. So mobile is a big factor here. So let's talk about mobile for a second.
So does any of this change when you think about from a mobile device standpoint, all pretty much the same? Is there anything else that we need to do to make sure our pages are optimized for local SEO from a mobile standpoint? Yeah, mobile is super important. So you want to make sure that the website is displaying well on desktop, but also it fits in a smartphone tablet where users can scroll down, look at the content.
You don't want to make the content too long where it's just this endless scroll and the user can't really get to the point of where they want to, whether that be a form specific call to action, we want to make sure that the phone number that's on the website is clickable on mobile, because if I'm searching on maps for a contractor and then I go and pull up the website on my phone, I might just want to click that button and instantly call the business.
So some websites don't have that feature or they don't have a form that's really easy to navigate on a mobile device. You want to make sure those things and those elements are in place. I agree, and I would add that how websites are built now, and now we're getting into websites over SEO, but how websites are built now, certain things could be hidden on mobile and then shown on desktop. That way it's not as long or it's a dropdown, so if they want to read it, they can, and then it goes smaller.
So it's definitely worth checking into mobile design. If the website is built, check it out on your mobile device. If you don't like it, talk to your developer to see if they can help make it more user friendly. The dropdown is great for FAQs, I think. Yes. Otherwise, it's so long. And there's a lot. Content's a fine line because Google loves content. People don't necessarily like to read all that content. And more and more we're just scrolling by, right,
TikTok taught us this. We can just scroll and go to the next. So when we have those dropdowns, we can make it shorter and we can keep the attention of our audience. Let's drill down there for a minute on FAQs. So how exactly, let's put FAQs at the bottom of each website webpage. How does that help at all? What does that do exactly from a Google standpoint? What's happening there that makes it effective? Google loves content, so it's content. You're beefing up a page.
A lot of times what I've seen with home service pages is they build the page and set it and forget it. So five years down the road, that page still has one stock image and it has one paragraph, and that's it. That page is probably starting to get outranked by competitors because it hasn't been touched in a long time, and it's very light on content. What those FAQs do is starts adding more content to the page and it starts showing relevancy to that page.
Google is going to see that that page has more information and that you're providing more information to make the user experience better and to help the user find what it is that they need to note so that they can make a decision and convert. Yeah, I agree with what she just said, is putting that content on the page for relevancy is super important, and then making sure that it is specific enough to that service that you're talking about on that page.
You don't want to really go off topic and talk about another service on that same page. Really dialing it down and focusing on what's the most important pain parts of a potential customer that they're going to be asking when they're searching out for a business. So we can have FAQs for each specific service page too.
So we've been talking about having a page for each part of town, and we will come back to that in a second, but we can also have a whole different set of pages for each service you provide, power washing, window cleaning, all these different services have different pages, and they can all have their own unique FAQs, right? Correct. Yeah. Each of those pages can have a unique FAQ to them.
So let's just say furnace replacement, furnace installation, furnace repair, can all have different FAQs on each one of those pages, and it's also going to be able to help your potential customers find you. But also it's good because it spreads the content out instead of trying to cram everything in on one page. So a lot of times I'll see heating and installation or heating and AC repair, and you're actually, what is the page talking about?
As we're talking about repair, we talk about installation. You can have those pages, but it's good if you can break those out. Absolutely. And I see with a lot of smaller businesses, they usually launch with a service page and the service page list all of their services. That's a good first start, but it's not going to help you with ranking that well, when you can break out those services into their own pages, you get the chance to start ranking for each of those service lines
in your area. So it beefs up your SEO power on your website. And then the third step, and this is taking it to a whole nother level, is so first we start with specific pages for each city, and then we go into having specific pages for each service. But then you can pages for each specific service and each individual city.
And so you just keep making the web bigger and bigger and bigger, and eventually your website's just going to collect every single search because you're just hitting every single keyword in every single city for every single service page. Any other tips on this having different pages for different services and locations?
I think what I would add is that after we created pages for every service, and then we created pages for all the towns in our county, because where we live, we commonly refer to a county, and then we went by the towns. We had an idea last year that, wow, we could actually go after high profile neighborhoods. Neighborhoods where we know that well hire us to do window washing, so services that are like premium services.
And so when we can build out pages that target those neighborhoods, and the idea is that somebody is doing a search for that neighborhood and window washing, so now they're not looking for Grand County window washing, they're not looking for winter park window washing, they're looking for Lakota window washing. I just targeted a neighborhood. Right? Nice. You can do that with ads too, if you don't want to create the page,
but you're spending money on the ads. If I bring it back to a page, now I'm saving it and SEO's doing the work to be able to start ranking in that neighborhood. And David, along those same lines, we all live in towns. We all know that the local terminology for certain areas, so even if it may not be specifically called that at the postal service, you can still target commonly understood names of areas of town, right? Correct. You could still target those and segment it out.
So just for instance, like in Philadelphia, if you live in Philadelphia, certain areas, what they're called or have been called for many years, but if you were to look on a map or go through the post office, it's called something entirely different, which many people out of town may look at that and say, oh, that's what it's called. But for everyone that lives inside of town, oh no, we call it this.
So that's how you can hyper localize that content for that specific page because the citizens that live in those areas actually call those things sometimes different. What you see on the map. And that's the word hyperlocal. And there are some people out there who really don't, they really bristle at hiring a non-local company. There aren't a whole lot out there, but there are people who really want to hire a local company who lives down the
street from me, and that can be the difference. Oh, they called it, no one calls it that they must not be local or they must be owned by somebody else who doesn't pay attention. But if they see those words that they call their town, then they're, oh, they understand me. They must be local. They've lived here a long time. They know what they're talking about. That's so true. Local citizens, they know. Yeah. So. How do you track all this stuff?
We want to make sure that these are all converting to leads, leads convert to jobs, jobs convert to invoices. So how do we make sure that we're tracking the right numbers and then also making decisions based on those results that we're not just going to spend money willy nilly. How do we track this. Stuff? Google Analytics four, GA four is what we call it, is good for segmenting out who's landing on those pages from what areas.
You can also customize your forms to ask the potential customers what service area you located in, and then you can see which service area that they're located at in the form field when they're filling out that information. If you're talking on a broader scale, and you're talking about targeting really big areas on your website, you may have tracking numbers, so different phone numbers on those different pages to be able to track where the results are coming from.
And I'll add in addition to Google Analytics, which is free and great resource for any business owner. Google also has a Google search console, which could be added to a website. And a few years ago, probably 10 years ago now, Google Analytics stopped showing keywords. But in Google's search console, you can still see keywords and you can also see what pages are ranking and not ranking.
And that's important because you may go and put the time into creating eight new pages, and you want to know if those pages are even ranking. You could actually go submit it to Google Search Console and tell Google, this is a new page, please rank it, and then you can monitor it over the next week.
Usually it's a couple days and it starts ranking, but up to a week, and you should be able to see that that page is ranking, and then you should be able to see if there's traffic coming to it and what keywords are coming in for that page. Okay. That's interesting. I want to go back to what David said earlier about having a different form on each page. Are you suggesting that there's a different form on every one so that you know
where they came from? Is that excessive, or is that actually a pretty good strategy? No, you can have a different form on everyone just to be able to make sure that you exactly know which page they came from. Yeah, and it's not completely foolproof because they could end up calling or they could end up navigating to a different, back to the homepage or something. But a lot of times they will use that form because we like to do things fast.
And so that's interesting. I like that. Guys, this has been great. I'm going to boil the conversation down to three actionable items here. Number one is build out subpages for all your unique services and all your unique locations and create that long tail. So over time, you get all these little hits and it accumulates into a lot of leads. Number two is it's okay to use local vernacular in your listings.
You can use commonly known areas of town that may not be at the post office, but everyone knows what they are. And number three is make sure that your website reads well. Make sure your content isn't excessive and redundant over and over again. Do you guys have any final tips for easy SEO quick wins for our listeners? Yeah, I think a final quick tip would be to actually spread those service
pages out. So instead of cramming in everything in one page, start creating individual pages for those services. And I'll add to that, if you write those service pages all in one day, which you're not going to, but if you tried, they all start to sound the same. So take a minute between the creating those pages, create a page, wait a couple days, create another page. That way each of those pages has unique content and you're looking at it fresh every time you create a new page.
Awesome. Well, Cassie, how do people find out more about you? You can find me@wheatleycreek.com or on Instagram and Facebook at Wheatley Creek. David. You can find me atDavid@contractrhino.com is my email website is contractor rhino.com, and we're also on LinkedIn at Contractor Rhino. Great. Well, guys, you guys know just like anyone else, that business matters. The impact that business owners have on the community matters a lot,
and you guys are having a big impact. We keep it up. I appreciate it. Thanks for having us. And thank you for listening. I hope that you learned something today that will make your local SEO more optimized and more robust for your lead generation. I'm your host, Adam Sylvester. You can find me@adamsylvester.com. Your team and your clients deserve your very best, so go give it to 'em.