I did not build my own website. I had someone else do it, which was the right call. It just takes so much time. Right? You got to create the copy and you got to also create, how's this actually going to look? Then you got to think about your conversion rate optimization. What I can tell you is most of the larger companies are not the owner's, not building the website. Welcome to Masters of Home Service, a podcast by Jobber.
Each week we talk to successful home service entrepreneurs and experts in their field to learn how they built their company so we can make your business more profitable and more efficient. We're in Las Vegas at Blue Wire Studios Today we have Phil Richer in studio. How's it going, Phil? Great. Thanks for having me. Absolutely. So you own Flash Consulting, which consults service entrepreneurs like myself in how to build their website properly, how to get leads, how to retarget customers.
We're going to talk about all that today. But first, tell us a little bit about yourself. So you were on Forbes, you had a blog. Tell us a little bit more about your background real quick. Yeah, so I went through the management trainee program at Enterprise Rent a Car. I was running a local service business, and then I went in and actually sold Fleet Management services for Enterprise.
And so I learned the trades in that and I started a blog outside of that and it got featured on Forbes, CNBC, business Insider, Yahoo Finance, a bunch of places. So then I went and did my blog, full-time was traveling and stuff, and when I came back, one of my clients from Enterprise Fleet Management, he was an air duct cleaning business owner and he was like, Hey, could you come and be my director of business development? I said, yeah, sure.
And when I went there, it all connected, which is business owners need a marketing consultant in their business that knows digital marketing, but also understands local service business and what to look for and how to use the data to make decisions from a marketing perspective. And that's how we became Flash Consulting. Well. Sweet. That sounds good to me. So you're a good resource for this.
A lot of our listeners, the website is on their mind and this whole episode is about making your website good, supercharging it, making it a legit way of getting leads and stuff, and not just letting it just be this static thing. So there's some listeners out there who don't even have a website. What would you say to those people who don't even have a website? How important is the website? What should they do about it? Yeah.
So what we found with the data is that 97% of people are going onto Google Business Profile or Google and searching for services in their area. They're trying to look at reviews and trying to make figure out, do I want to work at this company or not? And then they go to the website mostly because they want to know two things. How much is this going to cost and when can you do it? And so having a website allows for people to go there and find those two things.
If you don't have a website, it's not the end of the world. You can get by in the beginning with just a Facebook page, a solid Google My Business and start to get some deals off Facebook and Google. But if you're really looking to scale your business, you should look at having a professional website that's going to be kind of like that hub where everything comes. If you're doing Thumbtack and Nextdoor and all these places, it's going to drive traffic back to your website.
So what's the difference between a website that you obviously own and then Google My business or any other kind of Facebook page? I just think that those are more spokes in a wheel where the wheel is your website driving the traffic to a centralized location that's kind of owned by your business, where all those other ones are platforms or places that you have profiles on where you kind of need a central place to say, find out more or learn more about our company here.
Yeah, I would say I agree with that. I also think that a website is the most stable thing in terms of all your marketing channels. It's more stable than Yelp. It's more stable than Google. I can't believe I'm saying that, but it is, and it's more stable than Facebook page. I got hacked a few months ago. I lost my Facebook page for two months, right, the story, you know that. So you want to own your website. If you own it, let's be real. It can still be taken from you, but probably won't.
So I think owning a website is really important. I like your hub and spoke model because all these different things are pointing to your website. I go there, go there, go there. Not that you can't get leads directly from Facebook or somewhere else, but I do think it's important to have a website should people build their own website. So if you're just starting out, you can use a basic platform like Wix or these other providers.
Squarespace is a popular one, and get a basic website up in under a day or day or two. These are good for more brochure style websites where people come to your website and they start to learn about your business, which is kind of what we're talking about.
If you really want to supercharge your website and have it as SEO search engine optimization and people actually finding your website from searching online, then I would recommend hiring someone to actually build a website for you because they're going to know what to do and how to optimize it properly for getting leads from your website. Yeah, okay. Fun little thing. So we've all seen bad websites, we've seen really bad ones. Mine has been really bad. I'm the first offender.
What are some things that you see on websites that are just bad and they need to not do those. Things? Definitely well, stock images. If you can't take an iPhone and point and shoot at you or your technician in a branded something, you need to have those on your website. So get rid of as many stock photos as you can. That's bad. Having the website all about you is not good. There's a book called Story Brand,
and basically you're not the hero in the situation. You're the guide, the customer's the hero that has a problem, and you're the guide that's going to help facilitate that process. So you want to really talk to the customer's problem set that you can solve. And so that's what we've found a lot. You go to the website and it's like, look at me. I started this company 10 years ago in my garage,
which is great story, but nobody cares. Yeah, but customers are trying to come to your site because they have a problem that you. Solve. They want their AC to work again, they don't care when you start the company. None of that. Matters. Exactly. And so when you go to a website, try to focus it on the problems that you solve. Try to get some nice pictures up there, maybe share a couple of reviews from your Google business profile. That's good.
The book you referenced, Donald Miller, he's got a grunt and test basically, or if you can flash the website in front of you for three seconds, they don't know what it's about and then take it away. Can you tell me what the website's selling? And if you can't pass that test, and it's amazing how many fail that test. It's like I have no idea what that company is promoting or selling or offering. I have no idea how they can make my life better. Right?
So the first thing you want to start with a website is what's the problem I solve and what do they have to do to buy it? That's right. And then you do all the design stuff after that. SEO all, I have two companies. I built my own website for my first company, and I'm still holding onto it, but my second company, I did not build my own website. I had someone else do it, which was the right call. It just takes so much time. Yeah. Oh, absolutely. I mean, there's phases in it.
You got to create the copy and you got to also create how's this actually going to look? Then you got to think about your conversion rate optimization. Also, the technical search engine optimization side of things. There's a lot of pieces that people, YouTube education is fine, but at the same time, if you really want to scale your business and take it to the next level, what I can tell you is most of the larger companies are not the owners not building the website.
So I would encourage any of our listeners who may not feel like they can afford it. I get that, but as soon as you can collect your pennies, pay someone professional to build a website, it's worth it. Yeah, there's a good saying. Saying yes to something means saying no to something else. And so if you're saying yes to dedicating all this time to build your website, you're saying no to what you actually do Good. And so are you going to really become a website developer when you're a landscaper?
You have bigger Fisher Fry for sure. Hey, masters of Home Service listeners, we've got some exciting news for you. Jobber Summit is back on March 6th. Jobber Summit is a free online event that helps home service business owners and management teams reach new heights of success, enjoy a day of learning with expert speakers, covering in demand topics that will strengthen your business and leadership skills no matter what stage of business you're in.
Plus live networking with other home service pros who get what you're building, secure your spot and register for free today at jobber.com/summit. But there is a time and place for Google My business profile Facebook pages. Let's hang out here for just a minute. How can our listeners be optimizing those two platforms to again point back to their website? Well, Google is the number one search engine. Everyone knows that.
And so from a Google perspective, when someone searches for your service near me or your service with a geographical target in there, then you want to be shown on that. So going into your Google business profile, they give you a ton of things that you can do. I'll just give you a quick snapshot of what I would recommend doing.
You got to make sure that you have your cover photo up there with your logo, make sure you have a phone number, a website, and then make sure that you're posting on there because Google indexes any content that you're sharing. So even if you're posting on Facebook, you should post on your Google business profile. And then also getting reviews and responding to reviews. This is crucial.
Reason this is important is because Google says that 17% of your ranking is based off of how many reviews that you have, and when you respond to reviews, not only does it allow you to get after the one star reviews and share your great customer service, but it also allows Google to index more content from you and shows that you're engaging with your people. So then they're going to say, okay, I want to show this company in my search results.
When it comes to Facebook pages, like you mentioned before, if you're a smaller company or a newer company and you're getting into Facebook groups and you're getting referred all the time, you got to have a solid Facebook page. Because what happens is in these Facebook groups, people are saying, Hey, you should work with this company, and they tag you. Then they go to your Facebook page and it hasn't been updated in years. They don't.
Even bother with going to your website at that point because your. Facebook page is so bad in these groups. They tag your Facebook page and then they go to your Facebook page, and if it doesn't look like you have stuff going on, they're like, is this company still in business? What's the deal? So yeah, you got to have that. I remember when I found out going back to websites a little bit, I remember when I found out that there's so many things.
Go into SEO and search engine, engine optimization, all that, and how long you buy your domain for if you buy for 10 years, that's better than one year. I didn't know that kind of stuff. That's fascinating. To me. Yeah, Google has this thing called domain authority that they're looking at back
links, which are links coming back to your website. Also, how long you actually owned and had your URL, because at the end of the day, if Google didn't show you quality people that they trust, then no one's going to go to Google to actually search. So you have to do everything you can to all these triggers to show Google that you are the company that they should be referring. So it's basically your number one referral partner is the way that I look at.
It. Let's pretend our listeners just got a website in the last five minutes after hearing our conversation and now the I website, how do they set it up best for lead capturing? And then we'll get into what happens to that lead after it gets caught. But first of all, what's the first step? So you have a website, it looks decent. You want to have a contact form on there so that people can fill out a form. Once they land on there, maybe you can gather a little bit of information.
If you do carpet cleaning, you can gather some information about that landscaping, whatever, and so you want to have some type of form so that they can reach out. The other thing is if there is some capabilities for online scheduling, that's a great option, especially when you're just getting started. You go to networking groups, you say, Hey, go to my website, that kind of stuff, and then really focus on getting quality pictures up there because you're driving traffic back.
You want to make sure you have before and after pictures and anything like that. So I think that's really good starter kit for a website. If you're just getting started. Give me the 2.0, give me the more advance. If somebody gets that figured out, what do you tell on your really savvy folks? Yeah, so there's three things that you need on a website that's actually going to
really convert leads. You need to have a get an estimate button, and you got to ask some qualifying questions inside of that get estimate. So if you're doing landscaping, it's like your square footage, when do you want your stuff cut? A little bit of qualifying questions. It just builds like, wow, this company really cares about this stuff. And then it turns into a form. The other one you want to do is get service.
So some type of way to actually schedule, and you could do this in a simple form where you put a little calendar that they can select a date or something, an opportunity for people that are ready to actually schedule, they can get some service. And the last one is a chat widget for your website. The reason that this is so important, people come to your website, they don't know if you serve this area. They don't know if you do this kind of service.
A chat widget allows 'em to ask a question, and especially if it turns into text message, this is a great way to capture that lead and then also answer their question, and now they turn into a lead for you where before they would just say, oh, I don't know if they do this. I'm just going to go find someone else that does. So those are really the three things. The 2.0 of this is that if you get a hundred people to your website, then your goal to convert those people is at 10%.
So if you get a hundred people to your site, you should be getting 10 leads from your website, and if you optimize it with these specific call to actions, you should be able to get 10%. We have some companies that we work with that get 30%, and then once you get those numbers dialed in, if you're running ads or whatever, it allows you to know your numbers. So if you're driving traffic to your site, then you can say, okay, if I convert at 10%, it doesn't matter.
I can just keep increasing my traffic volume. I know pricing pages get a lot of traffic. Are they converting? Do they convert well? Yeah. So there's two schools of thoughts on pricing pages. The first one is that, yeah, I'm being transparent and I'm sharing the information with my customer, which is great.
The other thing is that you might be qualifying people out without actually telling them why you charge that price, and so you might be actually losing out on customers without showing them the value. So what we found is a two-pronged approach. The first one is if you can build an estimate calculator on your website, which we help companies do, but you can use a tool like JotForm or something to create an estimate calculator that will then turn into a lead or just have it on your site that
people can utilize. The second one works really good, and this is a book called They Ask You Answer. He has this framework in there, which is basically create the pricing guide for your business so that you are the subject matter expert. So if you do roofing, everything that someone should know about the roofing pricing, have a whole document about that that they can either download or just read on your website. So you don't actually give them the price,
but you just tell them what they need to know about pricing. That works really, really well, especially if you have a CSR team internally and they get a little pushback on pricing. You can say, Hey, we just actually created this whole document about pricing in the industry that I'd like to share with you, so that way you can at least have the best knowledge going into your purchase. Yeah, yeah. I think a pricing page shouldn't include every single price.
That'd be kind of nuts. Yes, but I think it's good to say we charge $99 for service call or if your referral, it's only $49. I think at least some degree of some transparency is really important, but I think trying to include how much it costs to install hot water heater, all that, that's a little bit too deep. Exactly. And people know that's too deep. I don't think they're expecting that, but I think I personally go to the pricing page. I think I always do.
If it's there, I always click on it. I'm curious. I'm glad that we talked about that. So what about a blog seven or eight years ago, blogs were all their age, you got to have a blog. You're not going to get any visitors to your website. Zero. And now has that cooled down some? How important are blogs? Yeah, so what I would say is from a blogging perspective, there's a good way to do this and a not so good way to do this.
If you're just going to chat GBT and asking to write a blog post for you, and it's something that is not geographically specific, then yeah, you're probably just wasting your time. Maybe you have it for content to share on your social media or something, but if you're using it specifically for search engine optimization and you're trying to create really quality content that people are going to actually utilize the book, they ask you answer. He talks a lot about that.
But basically the framework is whatever questions your customers are asking, create blog content about that. So to give you an example is pricing or this versus that. So should I get my lawn mow every week or every month? Then what are the benefits? This versus that type of content, your top questions, case studies, all that kind of content is really good.
More importantly, when someone searches on Google for how much does it cost for lawn care in Asheville, North Carolina, then that blog post should be relevant content that Google's going to say, oh, well, here's the data for you, or should I clean my carpet every week or every month? In North Carolina, for example, you have that geotarget in there. It works really, really good. So from a blogging perspective, that's good.
One other thing to that is if you're doing some type of retargeting and email marketing, even your social media content, you can use that quality content to then sell again. Also, if you have prospects that are giving you your CSRs price objections or other objections, you can put them into drip campaigns with that quality content that you've created to show you're the subject matter expert on this stuff.
So it's definitely good, but there's other ways that you can use it aside from just having blogs. Right. Yeah. Phil, let's talk about jobber and why we're here today and how much we like it and what it's done for our business. What's your favorite part about jobber? What I recommend about Jobber is the reporting aspect of things.
When it comes to tracking your marketing spend, your new customers, what's actually working, what's actually not jobber allows you to see a lot of those things, especially from a marketing perspective. We're able to take good data and make better decisions, and that's really what I like about using. Jobber. I like the scheduling report thing. It's kind of hidden.
It's not very well known, but you can actually schedule reports to go out to your inbox every day, every week, whatever your frequency is with your invoice aged invoices with approved quotes, all these different things. And so I actually send those reports. So if some of our technicians so they can track each week and their sales, it's pretty cool. If you want to try jobber out, go give a try at jobber.com/podcast deal.
You can get an exclusive discount for new customers and it'll make your business better. Go do the trial and then sign up and you'll never regret it. So what kind of things have you found in terms of messaging and maybe even exact words, maybe even that really move the needle?
What we found is that people go to Google, they're looking at reviews or Yelp, whatever, and they're looking for reviews, and then they're saying, okay, I think this company is one that is on my list of people that I want to maybe talk to. Then when they go to your website, they're basically looking to confirm that their research is validated. So they're saying, is this actually the problem that I need to be solved that this company solves? Yes, it is.
Is this really the company that they said they were on all these reviews? Yes, it is. Is it easy to turn into a lead and to become a customer of theirs? Yes, it is. So they're trying to go through these things. So to answer your question of what can they have on there, make it clear what you do, make it clear the services that you offer, make it clear where you do this stuff at, and then have some nice reviews and customer testimonials on your website as
well. Just you're giving them triggers back at it, and yeah, you want to try to convert them through that. I have two questions. They're kind of similar. There's some overlap. One is I see a lot of websites that have plugins and stuff that display maybe all the reviews or something other plugins tend to, well, as far as I know, well, bogged down your website, make it slow,
make it cumbersome, make it bulky. How do those, those might be useful in some ways, but they can also mess up your SEO and Google doesn't like that. So how do you balance those two? Yeah, that's a great question. So Google, if you type in and search for Google Speed Index, you can actually plug in your website and see what your speed is and what Google tells you, how you rank on their speed index for free.
So to your point is if you have a bunch of plugins on there and your website's slow, you might not rank as high because Google doesn't want people going there just sitting around waiting for your site to load. So there is a balance to that with one caveat to that, which is we have a client that we added a popup for a discount on their homepage, which in most instances is kind of like a no-no, because it slows up your site. It's another thing.
But what we found is that their conversion rate went from 5% to 10%. So do we want to take the hit over here or do we want to go over here? That's why, and it's. Not that slow. I mean, it doesn't slow down that much. Yeah, it's not that. Bad, right? Yeah, that's right. It's a little bit of a balance, but there's other tools like company Cam or even review widgets, stuff that can slow you down, but they also add a lot of value into your site. You kind of got to play a little bit with.
That. Let's talk SEO search engine optimization. Let's pretend there's a listener here who really just doesn't know anything about SEO and their business is growing and they need to get on this train to make sure they keep getting lead flow and all that kind of stuff. What are some things that you can do to your website structurally and copy wise to make it good for Google? Yeah. So there's two types of SEO. There's your onsite, SEO and your offsite,
SEO offsite. SEO is your Google business profile, your Yelp listings, your citations, making sure that your name, address and phone number match up across all your different listings offsite, and that's what it's going to help on. Your Google rankings and that kind of stuff on your onsite SEO, that's what you're referring to, which is more the technical side of things. What copy should you have does alt tags and title tags and meta descriptions, all this kind of stuff.
So what I would say for that is from an onsite SEO perspective on your website, you want to make sure that you're designating your geographical location.
So the way that this looks from a technical perspective is in your meta description and your title tag on your website, you want to make sure that you list out landscaping company in Asheville, North Carolina, and then in your meta description, you want to also put in your geographical targets in there, and then your H one on that page should also tie into that as well. Google just did an update that they said that they are going in and looking at your alt tags on your pictures on your website.
They always, yeah. Yeah. They kind of go back and forth. Now they say, oh, it's more important. I gotcha. But yeah, so those are more technical side of things. What I would recommend is if you're just kind of starting out with SEO, there's these things called service area pages, which are really important for a lot of businesses. So if you're in a specific city, but you also service maybe 10 or 20 other cities around you, you can create service area pages for each city that you serve.
You want to make sure that it's unique content because Google does look at duplicate content across the site, and then you can build out those service area pages, which will then give you a little bit of coverage around those places because your Google business profile that might only show up in your city that you currently offer, it might not expand around 20 different cities. And that's even becoming more a thing with hyper-local subdivisions and neighborhoods within a city.
You could have a subpage for even neighborhoods within one city. You're exactly right. People will Google lawn care, forest Lakes. You're exactly right. And so what you can do with that is when we talked about blog content, you can create a case study about Forest Lakes.
Maybe you did a new roof in Forest Lakes or whatever you did, and then you can share what the problem is that the customer had, the unique solution that you put together, maybe a review from the customer and then the ultimate outcome, and then you create that as a blog post, and it's a beautiful case study. All SEO optimized for your local geographical target areas. You can use it in your sales automations, you can use it in retargeting.
It's a beautiful thing, and it's all ties in with SEO, so it works really good. So earlier you were using a lot of mumbo jumbo that no one understands the H one tags, but here's the point though. For years I thought I knew bookkeeping and I didn't, and it cost me a lot of money to go fix all my books because I was arrogant and thought, I can do all this. It's easy. No, there was so many things I didn't know. Same thing with websites.
I thought I knew websites. I thought I knew Squarespace. I, and I knew like 5%, and so for years, I wasn't getting the results that I thought I should be getting because I just didn't know what I was doing. And so I would encourage our listeners who think that they know everything just like I did. Maybe you can go figure it out. There are some really bright people out there, but why hire someone to do this stuff for you? They know all this memo jumbo.
They can make your website squeaky clean and actually effective with all the, it's not just about the title, it's about the subtitle, the H 1, 2, 3, meta alternate, all these different things, and you can kill yourself trying to figure all this stuff on your own or just hire someone to do it for you while you're sleeping, and that sounds way better to me.
Yeah. What I would recommend is any company that you use, whether it's a bookkeeper or whatever, is they should have a heart of a teacher, and so they should be educating you along the way so that way you're not just in the dark with things. And so any company that you reach out to, they should be able to do some type of an audit on your site.
They should be able to educate you about why this is good or why this is not, and should you choose to go with them, then you should have a blueprint, and if not, at least you're smarter based on the conversation that you have with them. So there's a million, no offense, there's a million people like you, but they're not all created equal, right? Correct. So what should our listeners be looking out for? This is a great question for great. And the ones that they want to stay away from.
Yeah, great question. So if you do local marketing for local businesses, you should do the same thing for your business. So any local marketing company should have Google reviews, just like they should recommend their companies have Google reviews. So if you're thinking about working with a company and you go and you Google them and they don't have any Google reviews. That's a problem. It's like a carpet cleaner that has dirty carpets or something landscape that
has terrible, terrible lawn. If you go and they don't have a blog section, it's like, well, how do you know how to do blogs when you can't even do it for yourself? You start to check off the box. If you don't do it for yourself, how do I know that you're going to do it for me? Well, so that's a really good qualifier to walk through those things. Read reviews, do they respond to reviews? Do they have the Google business profile filled out? Do they have Yelp reviews? All those kinds of things.
That's really how you can know if it's a quality company that actually practices what they preach. Yeah. Yeah. I also think referrals are really important. I interviewed a couple companies in your space, not quite like yours, but a couple of years ago, and I asked them, I had a hunch,
so this is why I did this. I asked them for, give me to your clients and I'll call 'em, and both your clients said bad things about them, and so you just got to be careful that you're hiring a reputable company to do this kind of stuff. And there's plenty of reputable ones out there, including yourself, but you got to avoid the opposite of that.
Yeah. Definitely look for someone that will educate and givers gain mentality of like, Hey, here's what I would recommend doing, because you don't want people that are going to hold things over your head or hold things side to the vest. It's like you we're trying to give you the solution and sell the implementation side of things. Give us a final hack. Give us the best tip you got.
So if you can do online scheduling and you can incorporate that in your business, it's a game changer for a lot of businesses. One is because if you can go and build referral partnerships, like let's say you're a landscaper and you can build referral partnerships with a roofing and siding company, then if they want to refer you business,
they can schedule directly on your website or give you leads. Also, if you're retargeting customers, it will free up your CSR and you from just trying to schedule things over and over again. That's been a game changer for a lot of companies that we work with for sure. So you're talking about online scheduling and booking. That's awesome. And Jobber has released that feature, which I use every day. Awesome. And it is a total game changer. Let's be real. Eventually it's going to be, Hey,
Alexa, tell someone to cut my grass. Exactly. On Tuesday they're coming, cut your grass. That's happened. That's going to happen eventually. Correct. And you don't want to be on the slow side of that. And so we want to be placed in position with Google and the other search engine so that when someone says, I need my grass cut, we are the ones that Alexa goes, Charles Lawn Care.
And so online booking is critical why people go to websites to solve their problem, and if they can solve their problem before they leave and leave the website, let's be real. Their grass isn't cut yet, but they've solved their problem because they've checked off the list and they're coming. Exactly. And so the job or function for the online booking is really superb. Yep. You're absolutely correct, and I highly recommend it. Yeah. I want to summarize today's conversation and three takeaways.
Number one is the big three on your website. You need to have three things. You have get a quote online booking if possible, which it is with jobber, and then a chat widget. Those three things that specifically go to a text message, those are really, really big things for your website. Number two is optimize your Google business profile. Yeah, it's your number one referral partner. It's free. Go on your Google business profile, get it set up and optimized.
It's where the majority of your leads will come from for almost every service business. And then number three, build a page for each service area, whether it's a multiple cities, if you're a big regional company, or if it's hyperlocal neighborhoods and parts of town. Build out pages for each of those because people search those. Phil, thanks for being here. How can people learn more about you and your company? So if you go to flash consulting with the pH flash consulting.com,
we do marketing audits for companies. We'll meet for 30 minutes, go through our audit, give you the blueprint of what we would recommend. If you go with us, you can, if not, you could do it yourself, and that's a great place to start if you're trying to take your business to the next level. I think our audience got a lot from this. I certainly do have a couple of things I'm going to change about my website. I think I have a couple of stock photos on there,
so I'll go back and change those. But thanks for being here. I really appreciate it. Yeah, for sure. I'm thankful to our listeners for tuning in today. I hope that you heard something that will make your website better, which will make your business better. I am your host, Adam Sylvester. You can find me@adamsylvester.com. Remember, your clients and your team deserve your very, very best. So go give it to 'em. We'll see you next week.