The following is an excerpt of a consultation with a Design Build Landscaping Company and Lawn Care Marketing Expert…
DBLC: The previous firm had us do these things are called landing pages, so like if someone was searching let’s just there is a town Santa Monica, and I would type in Santa Monica patios and then it would pull up that landing page, which was specifically crafted for Google to pick up on that site. Then it would redirect back to the main website and then we have these like links, so we would pay like to be on link drivers like things, what our new guy said that that’s no good anymore because there is something called Panda, and we have to do; what did he say content on the website. So before our blog was separate and everything was separate and he said you need to put all that stuff together. So now our blog is on the page and we are posting on that a little bit more regularly.
LCME: Okay.
DBLC: It definitely, it doesn’t seem like and maybe it’s just going to take time, but, to get back to where we were but none of our competitors are definitely kind of higher up and are like scratching my head and wondering what do I do, how do I get up there.
LCME: Okay you bring up some good points. First of all one thing that can be affecting you in negative way and this can be checked out in your Google Webmaster Tools. You know I don’t want to get too technical on you, but there is a couple of different things that you need to check to see; because you mentioned to me the last company was rebuilding for you and you mentioned that it affected you when they did the Panda, that you dropped in the rankings?
DBLC: Yeah.
LCME: So there is something that you should be concerned with is that if they were creating sort of fake links or they were creating links with only purpose which is to boast your ranking, obviously.
DBLC: That’s what they are doing right.
LCME: Okay. The Panda update is actually a sort of Google filter, which means it’s going to push you down in the rankings if it sees suspicious link building activity.
DBLC: So is it possible those links are still connected?
LCME: Yes. Yes.
DBLC: Is that what you’re saying?
LCME: Even if they are not pointing at pages that are still live in your site…
DBLC: It’s out there.
LCME: They are pointing at your domain and it’s out there.
DBLC: How do you get that draft to call the old company and say “hey clean all this up”?
LCME: Well you know I’m just telling you about that, we don’t know for sure what that is, in fact giving you a negative.
DBLC: I should at least look into it.
LCME: You can look into it by, you already have Google analytics installed on your…
DBLC: Right the dashboard thing, it’s in what WordPress?
LCME: No Google Analytics is actually on the Google site, you have to install a piece of code in each page on your site. So if you have Google Analytics what you need to do is you need to log in to what’s called the Google Webmaster Tools and it will give you an error message, it will give you a warning saying “we have deducted suspicious links to your site” and that’s how you check. If you see that error message in Google Webmaster Tools, you know your ranking is been affected negatively.
DBLC: So we need to fix that.
LCME: Rebuilding, yeah.
DBLC: Okay.
LCME: Yeah. I’m not saying that it will not be occurring to you but that’s the first place I would start, so check that out. Then what you guys said about you know you can’t do link building the same way that you’re doing. If they are doing sort of what we call black hat things and sort of shady practices. Yeah if they were doing that what he is referring to is a content generating strategy where you write 400 to 500 word blog post.
DBLC: Right.
LCME: Different things like that, sounds like you’re already doing some of that. Correct.
DBLC: Yeah we got a Facebook and we have got, are you familiar with something called Houzz?
LCME: Houzz, yeah I have heard of it but we don’t use it particularly in what we do.
DBLC: It’s not good for lawn care but it’s a giant website of just home improvement stuff, it’s all pictures really, just eye candy. It’s for…
LCME: Just like Pinterest.
DBLC: Yes, yes. It’s specifically for housing and so we have a big post on there, we have got like a couple 100 pictures but the trick is trying to get people to like it right?
LCME: Yeah.
DBLC: That’s maybe kind of the plateau that we are at right now is we have got all this out there but we don’t have anybody promoting it or I guess liking it, like the Facebook page, it’s not that active. I think we have got like 4 friends. So there is something’s there I think that we need to really somehow figure out how to break through that ceiling.
LCME: Okay.
DBLC: And get to the next like the blog. We don’t really have anybody following that. Thing’s like that.
LCME: Okay
DBLC: So I think the infrastructure is there, it’s just a matter of figuring out how to get it to the next level.
LCME: Okay
DBLC: If that makes sense.
LCME: Okay. Something that, I’m just making a couple of notes here of the next steps I would recommend that you take. The first thing, obviously, Webmaster tools. See if you have any errors or warnings saying that Google suspects that you’re doing shady stuff. If you do get a warning like that, the good news is literally last week, Google released a tool called the Disavow tool. Where, if you are getting affected by Penguin and Panda updates because of suspicious link activity, you can go and enter in those negative links that are pointing at your site, and say “Don’t relate these to my site anymore.” In a month or so, your ranking will no longer be affected negatively by those links.
DBLC: Okay.
LCME: So you do have a solution there, and you do have a way out if that is affecting you. It might very well not be. That’s WebMaster Tools. I would also check out 301 redirects, the thing that we talked about. It might be too late. How soon did this roll out?
DBLC: About, I think like April, April or May.
LCME: Yeah, then it’s too late for that, I would say.
DBLC: I was getting some of those when I would go and look at it, but then they’re all gone. It stopped doing that.
LCME: Now you’re just seeing the new links in Google?
DBLC: Mmhm.
LCME: Okay. I’d start there with WebMaster Tools, see if you’re being banned. Then I would make sure you have Google Analytics.
DBLC: Yeah. I know we have that.
LCME: You do have it installed?
DBLC: Yeah. I got our first report for September.
LCME: I would check out your Analytics data and make sure that’s installed, because the basis of everything you do with online marketing, you need solid metrics. You need to know what’s working and what’s not. If you don’t have that, you’re going to spin wheels and you’re going to spend a ton of time doing social media activities that are questionable, that might not result in new projects, new work, different things like that. Make sure Google Analytics is installed, take a look at your metrics, see where your customers, where your traffic is currently coming from.
DBLC: What does that mean?
LCME: In Analytics it will tell you, I wish I had my laptop with me, I could show you this. It will tell you if you’re getting organic search traffic, which would mean that Google has indexed your site for a search term because of the content that you have on your page and the links to your page. There could be PPC traffic that you’re getting, which it doesn’t sound like you’re running a PPC campaign yet.
DBLC: We are. We do have a budget for that, but our goal is to get that to zero so that we’re all on organic, which, brings a question that I have. Keywords. How do you go about figuring out what keywords people are using to find you?
LCME: Okay. there’s going to be a number of different cities that people are going to be entering in with a combination of. For instance, patio builder in Santa Monica would be one of the search terms that you might want to think about
DBLC: Right. I mean. How do you pick? It just seems like there’s so much to pick from. If you look at the PPC, we say “Okay, we’re going to pay so much for swimming pool builders,” that term, so that when somebody types that in, our budget is that and we’re bidding on that work. How do you know what are the best words that someone is going to type in for us? Am I asking the right questions?
LCME: You’re absolutely asking the right questions. That’s usually where we start when we work with a new client. We usually do about an hour-long interview, where we really dig into their business, just like I’m doing with you now. I find out what cities that they service, and all of the services that they offer. So the first question you would ask yourself is “What would I type into Google to find a company like myself, that offers it’s services? Then one of them would be Santa Monica Patio Builders, something like that. You have a starting point. There’s a number of different services that you . . .
DBLC: And then that would be what you would put in the content on the web page?
LCME: Yes. You have to do that in a very specific way.
DBLC: What’s the way? When you’re writing the paragraph of ‘we’re this company, and we provide these services’, how does that fit in there? Right now, at the bottom of our page, we’ve got all this [the towns]. When you looked at the web site, see all down in here,
LCME: That will help a little bit, but now a whole lot. That’s repeated on every page, right?
DBLC: Yeah.
LCME: We have a very specific process that we go through, but the top three page factors are going to be the name of the page that you see in the browser title . . .
DBLC: That’s the URL, right?
LCME: No, that’s not the URL. That would be the-, if this was a computer web br-, oh, I’m sorry. Right there. Having key words in there are usually important. You’re limited to that.
DBLC: Oh, this up here? ‘Landscape, architecture”. . .
LCME: Those words are the most important thing on any page.
DBLC: So, who types that in up there, and is that different for every page?
LCME: Yeah, that’s actually hidden in the codes. If you ever do the V source on your browser, you’ll see a list code, HTML in Javascript. That is called the page title tag. It’s literally, you know, it looks like . . .
DBLC: So, is that the title tag from our home page? This is my home page.
LCME: Yep. That’s the title tag that you have right there. Which, yours isn’t set up too bad. If people are searching for landscape architecture and Santa Monica, but to be honest, I can’t think of a single client that you would get that would ever actually search for that.
DBLC: Okay. So I don’t think this is exactly the way we want it, then.
LCME: No, because if I was looking for somebody for me personally.
DBLC: But Santa Monica is just one little town. One little borough out of . . .
LCME: It’s not your most important, is it?
DBLC: It’s one. But I mean, it’s . . .
LCME: Okay.
DBLC: So, should this be more generic?
LCME: Well, it should be. The first page of your site should have your most important key word, and your most important city name, combination. So, to back up what we were just talking about, you were asking about how do I figure out what my key words are? Well, Google who provides a basic key word tool. That will give you a rough estimate of how much traffic to expect if people-, oh, I’m sorry. It will tell you approximately how many people search for that very specific phrase each month. One of them will be “pool builders” or “patio installer”
DBLC: If you’re doing PPC, that will give that key word more value or less value depending on how popular it is, right?
LCME: Yeah, it will charge you more per click based on how many other people are bidding on that same word. The first place that you will start, and this is part of the Google AdWords in there, I think it’s in the interface, if you go under “research” or, it’s up there in the menu, but within the Google AdWords interface, there’s an option that says “key word builder”, and you’ll go there. You’ll type in variations of services you offer combined with the city name. That’s typically how people are going to search. They’re going to search for “pool builder, Santa Monica” Okay. Another key word might be “pool builder, Santa Monica, CA” or “pool builder, Santa Monica California”. They’re all different variations of a key word.
LCME: You’ll basically come up with a list, working within this interface, of probably a hundred, two hundred different key word variations. You’ll start to see, when you hit ‘search’, it will give you back search data over the past twelve months of approximately how many people are searching for those phrases.
DBLC: Now, is that what you guys do?
LCME: Yeah. Once you can look and see how many people are searching, you know this word is more important than this word, and so on and so forth. Then that’s how you set up your game plan of “okay, using SEO, we’re going to target this key word combination, we’re going to target this key word combination, we’re going to pay more for this key word and Google AdWords and so on and so forth. You gotta use that tool.
DBLC: What’s it called?
LCME: If you just search Google, key word tool, it’s going to come up and you can go in and play around with it. That’s one of the first things that we do after we speak to any new client that we get.
DBLC: Okay.
LCME: That’s very important. I recommend that you and play around with it personally, so that you have some education and you know how to speak to your guy.
DBLC: Exactly. Right, right. Talk the language.
LCME: Yeah. I mean, we’ve dealt with companies of all sizes and you would be surprised, the number of companies that come us and we’re their third marketing agency. They’ve been burned by the previous two companies and they’ve spent thousands of dollars and didn’t really get anywhere.
DBLC: That’s, yeah.
LCME: My point is, it’s really important that you go off and educate yourself as far as a couple of different things, SEO. It’s good that you’re here and doing that. SEO and link building and some of these different techniques that companies employ so you can make an educated decision, and be able to speak their language and have an understanding of what they’re doing, what they can do for you and what they can’t do.
DBLC: Can I show you, this is the report?
LCME: Okay. So he just puts it in an email, here? Yeah. I mean, at the end of the day, page views and shares and people sharing your stuff on Facebook is nice, but if it doesn’t become clients or they don’t put money in your pocket, who cares?
DBLC: Yeah. I agree. How do you take it from that sharing and all that to . . . ?
LCME: Well, we use metrics and we use analytics. There we go. Okay. Great. Yeah, we use metrics and we use analytics like this. Mainly as a guide to see what opportunities we have to target content that we might not have thought about previously and to beef up different pages and to just see if we’re making any mistakes or different areas that we need to improve.
DBLC: How do I read this chart?
LCME: Yeah. I mean, this just tells you how much traffic you’re getting. You’re probably averaging 50 visits a day, which is fine. A thousand a month. Some people are coming back to your site. This probably needs to filter your company IP addresses your developer’s IP addresses because that’s going to show up in here as well. This is probably a little bit high.
DBLC: Right. Every time someone from our office goes on . . .
LCME: Yeah. That’s showing up.
DBLC: Right.
LCME: This is just kind of a guide. This is good to have, but I think the most important metric is how many times your phone rings. How many times people email you and ask for an estimate.
DBLC: Right, right.
LCME: That’s really the ultimate metric.
DBLC: How do we boost that?
LCME: There’s a couple of different things. Looking at your website, you have a pretty good looking website, but I can make a couple of suggestions here for you, that we’re really big about. Okay. You’ve got your website up there prominently, that’s good. Okay. One of the things that I would do, would be to put a form on every page because I look at websites like this. Websites can look pretty, they can display your work, but it has one goal and that’s to get people to call or email you.
DBLC: Right.
LCME: Anything that you do to your website, you need to think, does it help people call me or does it help people request an estimate? This new thing that I’m going to do to my website, does it help achieve those two goals? Those are the two only goals that matter. I think you have a great looking website. One of the things that I would recommend is maybe boost up the phone number a little bit over here. This area might be a little bit crowded. You could move the social icons down here, perhaps. I would feature some sort of request a free design consultation or something.
DBLC: Call to action.
LCME: Yeah. Some sort of form on each page. I know you only take on clients that are $10,000 and up, which is great, but you still want everybody to call. Make contact. I would have a form over here in the top right corner, with that request, name, email, phone number. Then your phone number more prominently up here in the top right. I’d maybe move some of the other stuff out of that area and just feature the phone number prominently.
DBLC: Okay.
LCME: Okay. Those are the two most important things. We know by looking at some of our what we call heatmap data. Heatmap tells us where people are moving their mouse on the cursor and kind of where they’re looking on a particular web page.
DBLC: Wow.
LCME: Obviously, everybody reads from the top right, down and across. The top right area right here is the place to put your two most important things: your phone number and form. I would do that on every page. It wouldn’t take a whole lot to kind of rework things. That would be the first sort of cosmetic thing that I would do. Then I would really go in and beef up each of your pages with some good content that is keyword rich. You can only write that after you do the keyword research and know what your keywords are.
DBLC: Right. Okay.
LCME: Okay. But you’re starting off in a much better position than a lot of people.
DBLC: Good, good. Well, that’s encouraging.
LCME: It’s good. That would be the first place I’d start. Make some changes to your website, figure out your keywords and then you would want to go and make sure, you have a guy doing website SEO. If he set up these title tags for you, though, I would be concerned that he might not be the best choice, because “landscape architecture Santa Monica” is not going to be a keyword that somebody looking for a landscape design build company is going to search for.
DBLC: I agree, I agree.
LCME: If you do landscape architecture, they would be searching for a “landscape architect in Santa Monica”. Okay?
DBLC: Right. You’re right on with that. So this title tag is very important.
LCME: Number one most important thing on your site. Okay? It’s going to be the title tag that’s going to be your most important and then we’re going to have . . .
DBLC: How many of these exist on our website?
LCME: There’ s one on every page.
DBLC: Okay.
LCME: Yeah.
DBLC: For each one of these galleries, each one of these is a different page, right? Is that a page?
LCME: That’s right.
DBLC: You can click on that?
LCME: Yep.
DBLC: Now we’re going to go to a new page?
LCME: Yep. New page title. There you go.
DBLC: This right here, Lloyd’s Lean backyard, which is specific to what this is, is not really going to be driving any traffic to this unless someone types in Lloyd’s Lean backyard?
LCME: That’s correct, that’s correct.
DBLC: We’re in a closet on this?
LCME: Yeah, you’re not really getting much SEO value from this page, in all honesty.
DBLC: This should say travertine pavers, outdoor fireplace?
LCME: Exactly, exactly. I would always use no more than two keywords that have to do with the page content.
DBLC: How much can you put in here, then?
LCME: About 65 characters. After 65 characters, Google devalues what you put up there. Because they don’t want you stuffing tons of keywords and stuff like that.
DBLC: All right. What is the process of labeling these? Do I need to go and call my web guy and say hey, we’ve got to sit down. Is it just a matter of going through this page by page and saying, “Okay. This is the title for this page, this is the title of that page”?
LCME: Everything starts with key phrase research.
DBLC: Right. Once that’s done?
LCME: Once that’s done . . .
DBLC: Then we go back and plug this in?
LCME: Yes.
DBLC: This is a mess, from basically what I’m learning.
LCME: Yeah. You’d want to go ahead back and change every page title. Okay. Let’s just kind of go through the list here.
DBLC: But, still, like ighting, we do landscape lighting, so we would want to have . . .
LCME: Yeah. That right there is going to be one of your big key phrases.
DBLC: I guess you would, once you get these keywords, you would then basically divide it evenly, salt and pepper through the whole thing? Just kind of figure out, Okay. We’ll splash this keyword here, put this one there.
LCME: Yep.
DBLC: It doesn’t really matter because it will all work in unison?
LCME: Let’s back it up just a minute and kind of go back through some of the important factors.
DBLC: All right.
LCME: Okay. We went through the title tag. That’s the most important thing. Then we get down here into what we call the body copy. The next thing is there’s going to be a header tag, an h1 tag, Okay? When I say h1, it looks like just like a title tag and the HTML code looks just like this. It’s just text wrap within these tags. Okay?
DBLC: Okay.
LCME: An h1 tag is going to look like this. It’s an h1. This is a title. This is what appears on the page. The word title would appear on the page, but if you look at the code, it’s wrapped by . . .
DBLC: You don’t see this part?
LCME: That’s correct. You don’t see it. You don’t see these tags. You see that content within the tags.
DBLC: And this is word specific to the research?
LCME: Yeah. You’d also want to put a keyword in here as well.
DBLC: Okay.
LCME: It could be a sentence. It could be a descriptive sentence but I would even include a key word in this as well.
DBLC: So when you have these brackets that’s telling the software to hide these words?
LCME: Yeah, it automatically hides these words. These brackets basically tell the browser where to display the content and how to display it. There’s a thing called style sheets that are applied to these tags. We don’t need to get into this but that tells it how to format it. Like make this bold and make it font type 14. Okay?
DBLC: Do web guys, you’re in it so I don’t want to sound so, like, negative. But do they kind of try to keep this secret so that they maintain their own prominence? Like, if Steve finds out about this then I’m going to not be as valued?
Q:Yeah.
DBLC: Does that make sense? You understand what I’m saying?
Q:Yeah, you can get some of that. But the most common thing is that, because just web designers, if you ask them to do something and you’re paying them they’ll pretty much say yes, I know how to do that. Even though he can set up a webpage and he can design a website doesn’t really have anything at all to do with search engine optimization.
DBLC: Right, right. I’m finding that out.
LCME: It just means you can set up a webpage and design a website. So there’s a whole other science to this side of it as well. You know? My company wants to employ developers that are specialists in programming.
DBLC: The code.
LCME: Right. Then we have guys that just do another thing which is design the site, the layout. All they’re concerned with is how the page is laid out, does it convert when people get there? Does it look trustworthy, credible, professional? Then we have SEO guys that are concerned with the content. How the code is formatted. They work with the developers. They make sure all the code is formatted properly. They do the key phrase research. They do the off page stuff such as building links. The handle the social media. They analyze the metrics.
DBLC: And it all comes together.
LCME: Yeah. So it’s really rare, I actually just did an interview with Lawn and Landscape Magazine.
DBLC: Oh, Okay.
LCME: And the guy, the gentleman, the editor there was asking me “so if somebody wants to hire an SEO company…” I’m sorry, “if somebody wants to hire somebody in their company to handle their online marketing, you know, how do they find that one person?” I’m like well, first of all if they do find one person he’s going to be a badass rock star that you’re going to be paying much, much more money than if you hired an agency to do it for you.
DBLC: Outsourcing.
LCME: Yeah. I say that because the number of different skills that you need to be a specialist in to have a really effective online marketing strategy are huge. I mean, Google Ad Works, the pay-per-click program that you’re talking about, we haven’t even dove into that. I guarantee you’re wasting a ton of money there where you could save money by actually hiring a specialist to manage it for you. You pay him to manage it for you but he’s saving you money because you’re wasting a ton of money. That program is insanely deep.
DBLC: We’re wasting money bidding on the words?
LCME: You’re probably bidding on the wrong words and you’re probably not…
DBLC: All right. I agree with you on that.
Q:One of the most common mistakes is that you’re not excluding geographic regions outside of your service area. That’s a pretty common one.
DBLC: No, we did. Well, actually it’s funny you say that because the other company that we were paying to do all this had three different campaigns. We had a regional, a local, something like that. The new company that just did this website came to us and was like “you guys were paying for things that you had no business paying for.” Which was like, which was exactly the word you said. He cut all that out and redirected it back. I guess we’re learning things as we go.
LCME: There’s so much waste, as far as, there’s so much money wasted by lawn care entrepreneurs that mean well and want, excuse me, know that they need to be doing online marketing. But they haven’t educated themselves just enough to be able to look over the shoulder of the guys that they’re paying. They don’t know if they’re getting ripped off.
DBLC: That’s kind of my responsibility at this point is looking over the shoulder and making sure that things are going all right.
LCME: You’ve got to do a little bit of education on your own.
DBLC: Right. So how, I may be jumping around, but how do you then dovetail your online marketing…
LCME: These are perfect for you. These are a couple of guides that I have for you.
DBLC: Oh, great. Well thanks.
LCME:
You need that one. I’ll give you some guides here. This is coming out, don’t show this to anybody. This is coming out in California Landscapers Magazine.
DBLC: This is an interview you did?
LCME: This is an article I wrote for the magazine. California Landscape Magazine. It’s not out yet, but you can take a copy of it with you.
DBLC: How do you cross or bring everything together as far as a marketing plan for the business. You’ve got online, you’ve got print, all the media. What’s the strategy for bringing all of those things together. Direct Mail. We messed around with it and it wasn’t that successful. Maybe we were doing it wrong or maybe you’re going to say don’t waste your money in direct mail.
LCME: We only work with Think Green industry clients, but the strategy varies from design build companies, hardscapers, versus what we do for lawn care companies. It’s a different strategy.
DBLC: Because of volume and the matrix.
LCME: You’re not dealing with recurring service, generally.
DBLC: We do, I don’t have the numbers off the top of my head, but maybe we get 400 leads and we process those and we end up with 200 appointments. Out of those 200 appointments we go on, it’s maybe about 50 designs, and out of those 50 designs, 35 become projects. We have a lot coming in a filtering.
LCME: You have a long sales pipeline, I’m sure. A couple month’s at least.
DBLC: Minimum. Unless it’s like a return customer that wants something. That turns around pretty quick. The majority of our sales are months in the process.
LCME: And this is where social media and email marketing plays a factor. There’s a lot of people who are window shoppers that are looking around and looking at design ideas for their home, but they’re not going to contact a company until they’re ready to move forward and actually get quotes. I think some way to capture those window shoppers, for you, in particular, that you can get their email address and send them occasional emails.
DBLC: So is that Constant Contact, something like that. Do you recommend?
LCME: That would work. We use AWeber , internally, but Constant Contact is fine.
DBLC: AWeber?
LCME: If you’re on Constant Contact, stay with it.
DBLC: We don’t have anything, so that’s one of the things I want to implement.
LCME: Constant Contact is going to be fine. It’s going to be more user friendly than what we use.
DBLC: Okay. Because we don’t send anything. I look at our database, and we’ve got maybe 3000 contacts in there from wherever we first started. We used to use Act, but then we switched over to Outlook. From Outlook, when we went over, this January we switched everything over to Apple instead of PC, so whatever that transition caused, we are now doing Contacts in Apple. It’s like a Google, a Google Contacts. We’re not using that database. We’re not marketing to our existing customers at all, and I really feel like we’re leaving.
LCME: Money on the table.
DBLC: Yeah. Does that sound right? Should we be.
LCME: Yeah.
DBLC: I’m not saying we should overwhelm them with something every month or every week. I hate getting that crap myself, but there should be some kind of quarterly thing that we send out, or something. I just don’t know what to do.
LCME: I would send, man there are so many things we can talk about. We can go super deep on this. You have a ton of opportunities.
DBLC: This year has been good. In talking to other people it seems like there’s been a little bit of resurgence in the market and things are going better, but our phone isn’t ringing off the hook, and a lot of our jobs are from referral. They’re not a lot of cold leads that are coming in. I think one way, we’re very blessed that we’ve got a very strong circle of clients, but I think we can be farming more prospects.
LCME: Your website isn’t yet the sales funnel that it needs to be. When you start to get your SEO right and you get a solid social media plan in place and a PPC in place, you know they all work together. For you particular, the low hanging fruit is to focus your budget and your money on the online marketing; and not so much on the direct mail. Because it’s going to be very difficult to get a well-qualified list, and not end up mailing a ton of stuff, spending thousands of dollars, mailing stuff to people who aren’t even interested.
DBLC: Right, and they’re just going to look at them.
LCME: Yeah, yeah. So, the awesome thing about online marketing and SEO and Pay-per-click is that, when somebody does a search for landscape architect in Santa Monica, they want a landscape architect in Santa Monica right now. They might not be ready to buy that day, but they entered in that search term, so they’re looking for one. We want to do everything we possibly can to get that person on the list. We want either their email address or we want them to talk to one of our design consultants, our specialists, whatever. Let us come out to your property and give you some design ideas, show you some of our work, something like that. So that’s the way I’d approach it. Online marketing, SEO, pay per click, they’re all just tools to accomplish a goal, which is to get leads or to increase the lifetime value of a customer. You mentioned that many of your customers will call you and you will do jobs for them over a period of time. You’ll do different things on the property. So you want to harvest those and stay in the back of their mind.
DBLC: Right. Well let’s say they have a friend that says they’re going to do this or that, you will be able to say, “Call Botanical.”
LCME: Exactly, and if you’re staying fresh in their mind –
DBLC: It’ll be there.
LCME: They’ll say “ Hey, I know these guys. I just saw they posted this cool, awesome looking job just the road from you. I saw it on my Facebook page, it showed on my news feed.” So you have a ton of opportunity, particularly in your type of market and design build, even more than lawn care,
there’s not a lot of people that are going 100% full force at this stuff. So even if you start to chip away, and implement some of these strategies really strongly, you’re going to be that much further ahead of your competitors.
DBLC: Right. In our industry, I can’t speak for anything outside D.C., but there’s tons of landscape companies. You can throw a dart and hit something. But at the same point, there’s not a lot of competition from the standpoint of, when we get in front of somebody they may be talking to two or three other companies, but it never seems like it’s a very big issue as far as price point. It’s almost more getting our name out, the name recognition. So maybe that’s where this SEO comes into play.
LCME: So once you get in font of them you for the most part. I mean with the 25% close rate, it sounds like you guys are doing something right once you get in front of them.
DBLC: Right. So how do you rise above the pack in terms of marketing and the perception of what people see?
LCME: One step at a time. The first thing is to really implement a full force SEO plan properly.
DBLC: What’s the duration of that? How long does that take?
LCME: Oh, it’s on going. They’ll go in, optimize your site, get all the tags, get all the content right, add a ton of new content of new content to it then each month you would want to be adding as many new blog posts as you possibly can and doing link building. So you’re going to be doing stuff every month. Or, whoever you hire is going to be doing stuff for you every month.
DBLC: One of my thoughts was, we have four designers in the office, so I wanted to task everybody with writing –
LCME: One blog a week.
DBLC: Just give that to me, I’ll post it. I was just going to put a folder on our server, type it, have it done by the end of the week. That way the content is there.
LCME: You know, in WordPress, you can set up author accounts, so they can actually have their own username and password, log into the blog, just do it. You know, just start small. Just assign one blog post a month to each designer [inaudible 00:39:31]. Chuck’s is due on the first week, on Friday by the end of the week. Then Tom, his is due the second week of the month. So they’re only doing one a month, but you’re getting a new blog every week. That will add so much content. Then set a limit on it and say it has to be at least 400 words, 400 words is nothing. It’s like a page. It’s nothing, which is easy to do. You could even give them some guidelines on what topics are appropriate. Since you are going to do your key phrase research, you’re going to provide them a list of
DBLC: Make sure these words get in there.
LCME: Use, use, you know, write me an article that’s four hundred words and use three of these words in your article. Easy, easy.
DBLC: Now how do you pull from the blog post? What are the techniques to get people to be reading it and then saying like followers, how do you? Because there’s so much out there it’s just overwhelming. What do you do to get someone to be interested in what you’re doing?
LCME: I would definitely make them multi-media friendly. People like video; people like photos. So, I would always include a video or photo in each post. And, when you start doing the blogging, you want to tie that into a social media campaign. That’s going to be an easy way for people to interact with you. You want to post every blog post on your facebook, twitter page.
DBLC: So, when you say campaign, is that a specific event?
LCME: Campaign might not be the right word. It’s just an ongoing social media effort. I would also even cross post your best photos of your best work to Pinterest. That would be a good place. Since you are working a visual media on where you design beautiful work. You know, this would be appropriate for you. You mentioned it’s like ?. So, I would do that. You know, give them some guidelines on what topics you think are appropriate, different things like that. Have fun with it; let their personality out.
DBLC: Right, right.
LCME: You know, so it can be something that people will want to read. So, you were kind of asking, well how does that work? What good is doing a blog?
DBLC: If no one is reading it..
LCME: Right, if no one is reading it. Okay. So, what you are doing.. And, the reason why I say have them do at least 400 words is you’re creating a ton of contents for your website. And, what does Google need in order for your website to show up within Google? It needs content to ?, right? And, so all of these different blog posts that they’re writing, they are creating original content and in variations of words and key phrases naturally. So, the more posts that you have and the fresher that your site is in Google’s eyes, it’s going to help boost your ranking, number one. And, two, when you have so much content on your site, you are going to start looking at your analytics and you’re going to see that you’re getting a lot of traffic from phrases that you never thought of. So, your main key phrase might be “landscape architect Santa Monica” but you’re going to start to see that I got two pieces of traffic from somebody searching for “landscaping architect with insurance coverage” or something like that. That’s a key phrase in it’s own. That’s completely something else that you hadn’t thought of and that’s not something that you’re targeting with link building or your SEO campaign. So, the strategy behind the blogging is that you’re creating a ton of content, a ton of new words on your site that Google can index, and increases the ? that when somebody’s doing a search for related services and things that you do, that one of your pages are going to show up. So, that’s the strategy behind blogging. And, you would tie those blogs obviously into social media. You want to post that on Facebook. And, we were talking about your website and how you can improve it. Another thing that you need to do.. You can do this immediately. I saw that you have links to Facebook and Twitter up there in the header, they’re kind of hard to see. So, what I would do is.. Actually, I just changed my website so I don’t even think I have it on mine anymore. I just changed it on Wednesday. But, I would implement and you might have to do it down over here or something but what I would do is, I would implement one-click buttons where you click a like button and it likes your Facebook page.
DBLC: Oh, I’ve seen that before.
LCME: I do it on my website but I think my developer just rolled out my new version and it might not be completely done yet. But it’s basically just a Facebook like box and you see the faces of the people who liked your page. Different things like that. So, I would implement the part where they can just do a one click like of your page. And then once they hit like, any time that you update your Facebook page, your updates are going to show up in their news feed. You follow me?
DBLC: Because they’re following us?
LCME: Because they clicked like..
DBLC: On the front page.
LCME: Right.
DBLC: So, we have to make that as easy as possible.
LCME: Just like your phone number and just like your estimate box. You know make that as easy as possible. Twitter also has a one-click button that you can use, as does Google+, if you want to implement that. I would put all three on your website now. It’s going to take a while for you to get up too 100 followers and things like that. The more followers you get, the more financially feasible. It makes sense to start spending a lot of time on Facebook and stuff like that.
DBLC: I think within our marketplace, in our area, and the peers that we’re competing against, when you think about it, I think we stack up pretty good. I would say we would compete among the top 10 or 15 firms out of the Santa Monica area, but there’s got to be a way that we can raise our awareness. I think our level is up here, but what we are known for, or our awareness in the industry, is down here. We are like stealth, just kind of cruising along. I’m trying to figure out, when you talk about campaign, what we can do to call attention to ourselves, and raise that awareness, like a blitz or something. I don’t know what the terminology is or how to bring that together. We’ve been around for a long time and people say, ‘Oh, yeah. We know them.’ But we’re not quite the go-to. How do you get to be the go-to, like the Lamberts or Patty or any of those guys.
LCME: You’ve got to get to the top of the expert pyramid, is what I call it.
DBLC: So what is that?
LCME: Do I have it in here? No, I don’t have it with me, unfortunately.
DBLC: You know what I’m talking about.
LCME: Yeah. It’s sort of a pyramid of authority, is what I call it.
DBLC: Right.
LCME: It’s where you’re a lawn care technician and you’re working in the field and you’re a commodity. You’re just like everybody else, right? Then you’re a lawn care owner. You have some authority and you have some specialties and you’re at that next level. Then you’re a guy who speaks in the community, owns a landscape company, and runs a couple of crews. Then you’re the celebrity guy who’s the celebrity landscaper that’s on TV.
DBLC: Top Chef.
LCME: Right. So the way that people climb up this pyramid is, they do things in their industry that expose and get them exposure.
DBLC: Working through Planet, do they help with that kind of thing? What are the resources that I should be looking at or tapping into?
LCME: The most effective thing that you can do is start locally in your community. People automatically think that you’re an authority if you write a book or you appear in print or you appear on video, and appear knowledgeable before you’ve done work on celebrities homes, perhaps. Okay?
DBLC: So like, E-book, is that something to do or is that cheesy?
LCME: You could do an E-book, but the authority would be you promoting your book on your website. Okay? For you, the strategy I would implement, would be to reach out to local newspapers, Okay? The more visible the better.
DBLC: Like their Home and Garden editors?
LCME: Exactly. Get in touch with the editor of that department. Tell them a little bit about your business. Tell them, “I haven’t been seeing a lot of articles about such and such, in your Home and Garden section. We’ve had some great, unique ideas for pools and different things that we’re doing this season.” Propose several different article topics for him. What you’ll find is that most of these editors, and this is true for me, too. I just met with Landscape Management, Turf, [inaudible 00:49:43]
DBLC: The easier you make their job, the more they want to use your content, right?
LCME: I’m doing, right now, exactly what I’m telling you to do, and it works. It’s how you get authority and it’s how you get free PR, in exchange for you providing them with content. They need to fill pages, you know, they needs to sell ads.
DBLC: Because I’ll have an editor call once in a while and they’ll say, “Hey, we’re doing this story. Do you have some pictures,” and we always have camera ready stock for that. Just because we enter a lot of awards, we try to do that kind of stuff. So we’ve got photography. It’s kind of funny because they’re like, “Well, I need it tomorrow. My deadline’s Friday,” you know, that type of thing. I said yeah, I’ll send right over to you. So, it’s there and we participate in that, but this pyramid thing I think you’re right. I don’t know.
LCME: You know.
DBLC: I guess it takes work.
LCME: Everything does, everything does. It’s actually a luxury if you can find a good online marketing agency that knows what they’re doing. It makes it easier for you.
DBLC: I feel like we’re at that threshold but either we don’t have the time to cross over, step over that, or we’re just not doing the right things to get noticed.
LCME: Yeah.
DBLC: I think if we’re able to, we would rise to the top pretty quickly.
LCME: And you’re in better than most. You wouldn’t believe some of the companies that we talk to. They don’t even shoot photos of their work. They don’t even shoot before and after photos. I’m like, how do you convince me to hire you if you they can’t see what you’re capable of.
DBLC: Right.
LCME: Also, before you forget, you mentioned that you guys won some awards.
DBLC: Yeah.
LCME: You know, the key here to climbing this pyramid is being a self-promoter. I mean, that’s what it comes down to. Toot your own horn, is my point. So you’ve won awards. Feature those on your website. I’m sure there’s logos and there’s seals.
DBLC: Is that something that’s sent out a press release to the area, like papers and stuff like that?
LCME: I don’t know if they send that out specifically as a press release to papers, because that doesn’t add…
DBLC: There’s no human interest or anything like that.
LCME: Yeah. Think about topics that would give value to their readers. What would their readers find valuable? That’s what you want to send a magazine.
DBLC: Yeah, top 10 reasons to build a patio.
LCME: Yeah, something like that, or something about how to get your patio done by summer for summer barbeque season.
DBLC: Or whatever the trend is, right. But then i guess you would use the awards as your credentials that makes you worthy of being the expert.
LCME: Yeah, you’re going to have two things happen: either approach as many editors in magazines and newspapers in areas you service. The more well-known the magazine or newspaper is the better. You’re going to present topics that you would like to submit to them, I would just introduce yourself and say, “Hey, can I send you some outlines of some possible topics for your magazine? You can tell me if your users would find it valuable,” then just send them a blueprint, an outline, 10 bullet points, a title, things like that. If they respond to it, you go and fill out the bullet points and you fill out a four or five hundred word article.
DBLC: Right.
LCME: So what’s going to happen is, they’re going to say, “Yes, I like this article idea. Can you give me 600 words?” And you’re going to get a footnote at the bottom that has your company name, your name, and maybe the URL to your website. So people can go and still Google you and find you, so that’s good. That’s what we’re after. After they do that, after you’re published once, you go and you take the logo and you take the article and you feature and promote it on your website.
DBLC: With a link back to it?
LCME: With a link back to it. You don’t even necessarily have to link back to it. You can just paste the article within your website, and promote it in your emails to your existing clients like that. That will help you draw out some additional business. Maybe even if someone’s like, “Oh, Okay. Well, you know what, I do want a patio for summer barbeque season.” So you can reuse these different things. So either they’re going to ask you to write an article for the journal, or they’re going to call you and say, “Hey, can I get a quote for an article?” Either way your name’s getting published in that magazine. That’s the first step that I would take on climbing this pyramid. The other that I would recommend is –
DBLC: What kind of pyramid do you call that?
LCME: I call it the Pyramid of Authority.
DBLC: I like that.
LCME: I don’t know where I’ve seen it, but you know that’s the exact strategy I take in my business. I mean, I give, the two ways that I get new clients is I give away a ton of free information. If you go to my website lawncareexpert.com, it’s basically just a blog where I tell you how to do everything that we do for you. 95% of our visitors will never write me a check or never give any money but the 5% that do, do.
So that’s my strategy. And then of course, I get a lot of PR from the magazines and stuff like that so our bigger clients will come in through that gateway. So another thing that I would recommend is video. I would recommend that you or some of your team leaders may be someone deep on your staff, shoot some personal videos. I know that you probably feel awkward doing that.
LCME: You need a professional film crew or you just film it?
DBLC: The more professional you can get it to look, the better but if you want to really go professional you’re going to need a $10,000 camera and all that stuff. But my videos, I shoot them all on my iPhone.
LCME: Well, I’ve done that on the side. Like say we’re shooting pouring some concrete or forming a pool, I’ll shoot like 5 minutes with that and then post it like on the blog.
DBLC: Okay. Great. And that’s perfect for reposting on Facebook and stuff. Of course, you know, you said you only had like 4 Facebook followers?
LCME: Yes.
DBLC: So the first thing you got to do is you got to make it easier for them to like Facebook.
LCME: Yes, this is a good idea.
DBLC: Make sure you do that. And then once you get up to about, you know, for us to do social media for a client, I say it’s not really cost effective for us to do it for you unless you have at least 100 followers.
So the goal here is to get up to 100 as quickly as possible. Once you get to 100, you can start justifying spending. Maybe 30 minutes to 1 hour a week on social media.
LCME: So can I send out a newsletter for constant contact?
DBLC: Yes.
LCME: And say with the link to our Facebook page “Hey, if you’re on Facebook, visit this page and Like us.”.
DBLC: Absolutely. And you should.
LCME: I mean, I can get 100 pretty quickly by that, right?
LCME: You would immediately and I also I would completely do that. I would also recommend that in the footer of every single email that your company sends out, you have a “Like Us on Facebook, button” our link. I say “Why don’t you like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter”, whatever. I would put that stater in the footer of every single email that you send out. And you can configure that on Gmail or Outlook or whatever you guys use internally.
DBLC: Now, what about Angie’s list? Do you know anything about that?
LCME: Yes. Some of our clients use it. Results vary based on industry. Typically what we see for Angie’s list and [Service Magic], a lot of price shoppers.
LCME: Yeah. You know? that’s what I think. And my boss is like really? For some reason he’s really big on it. I’m like you know, we’re not getting anything out of this except some lady that wants 3 azaleas and it’s like.
LCME: Yes, in since you have a, I would say you’re not at the low end of your market. You only do 10gs and up. So I don’t think Angie’s list is going to be right for you typically.
DBLC: So here’s an interesting question. Like, a lot of our clients are executives, CEOs, physicians, you know, professionals. How do you reach those people that are not on Angie’s list, looking on Angie’s list and they’re not coupon shoppers? They want action, they want the best and they want somebody to call them back right away and they want to use someone who their friends, when their friends hear Oh, you’re using Botanical, they say ‘Holy crap, that’s cool’. They’re like the best of whatever.
So how do you break into some of those circles that are almost like elite circles and not just the run of the mill, you know, merchant circle ad people? You know what I mean?
LCME: You have to, this is where…
DBLC: Is that where the networking, I mean, there must be some way of reaching those specific groups.
LCME: Yes. There’s the first thing is you have to touch your past customers more often. So referrals are your ultimate game plan when it comes to more of the same. Typically your high end customers have friends that are high end.
DBLC: That’s right. That’s right. I always feel like thinking about this a lot is that we need to redirect some of our marketing budget towards staying in touch with our customers. Because right now we finish the job and we’re done and we are really not coming back around to this people saying, you know, Hey, how is it going? or I don’t know, even if we can divert our crew for one day every other week, and go around to some of our old jobs, I don’t know. Drop flowers off, or put some pots on their front porch, I don’t know, but there must be a way of farming that little field, as opposed to looking at the ocean of fish that are swimming around out there. I don’t know. That’s just my opinion. My crazy brainstorm.
LCME: Your crazy brainstorm is a great idea. I think that’s a great idea. I mean, something that would set you apart from any other competitors, and would keep you in the back of your mind of, any client that you do this to.
DBLC: Like I could just imagine them being at the bus stop and be like, “Yeah, landscaper came by yesterday and just left flowers. I mean, can you believe that?”
LCME: That’s exactly right. That’s a fantastic idea. You want to do things that make you stick out in their mind, that make your clients talk about. What you just said, I think, is a perfect idea. I think you should spend one day a month doing that. Schedule one day a month go buy [flats of color]. Maybe it doesn’t even need to be something crazy where you have to go and plant it. Maybe it can be some sort of arrangement, some nice pot, or some sort of arrangement that they can put out front on their door or something like that. Or maybe just some interior plants or something. The goal here is to come by ..
DBLC: Maybe even do some pruning, or replace a dead plant. Hey, stopped by, saw a dead plant. The deer ate it, whatever. Put the new one in for you, don’t worry about it.
LCME: That’s exactly how I would approach it. Hey, I want to drop off these flowers, and see how things were looking.
DBLC: So, if you were to take that concept and turn it into a tag-line that you would market towards, what would you, I don’t want to say white glove because that’s too passe. But, do you understand what I’m saying? So like, when we put out a piece, we say New York Life has the company you keep. There must be something so that people would relate to that and say, “Oh, geez, Botanicals. The one that, I don’t know, got your back or whatever.”
LCME: I’d actually have to do some brainstorming and come up with some tag-lines to be quite honest.
DBLC: But doesn’t that sound like a way to bring it all together?
LCME: I think that’s a great idea. Another thing that you can do, to tie that in, I really think you should do that. So just tie that into a follow-up. A month after you’ve done the project, swing by, check up on them, ring the doorbell say, ” Hey, I brought you some flowers, and we were just checking up on your property to see if everything still looks good, nothing’s died yet or anything. There’s no disease or insects,” whatever; any excuse. Just have a conservation with them. Ask them if they’re still thrilled with the job, and that you brought them a really nice bouquet of flowers.
DBLC: Would you say that’s the salesperson’s responsibility then or, how would you divvy..? We’re a small firm. We’ve got four designers, including myself, and the owner company. One at admin and a production crew of about between 15 and 20.We’re producing about $5 million.
LCME: I would say it depends on the personality of the individuals. You’re a really personable guy, so if you showed up at somebody’s door
DBLC: My issue [inaudible 01:03:55]
LCME: Yeah, I know you’re like, “Oh great. I got to do this now.”
DBLC: I’m sure it would be worth it, and maybe it’s just a matter of me scheduling my week appropriately and say, “Hey, I’m going to be down this road this week, make sure I pick something up and as I go by Mrs. Jones house, done.”
LCME: The ideal person to do it is the person they’ve had the most contact with.
DBLC: Right, which would be the salesperson.
LCME: Okay, then it should be the salesperson.
DBLC: Not some four men –
LCME: No. Yeah, it would mean more coming from the person that they dealt with directly.
DBLC: Right.
LCME: So I would definitely, but there’s a couple things that you can do. Since you’re willing to go out and actually talk to your costumers, you’d be surprised how many lawn care companies and landscaping companies that, they don’t want to talk to their past clients, or they don’t even want to talk to their existing clients. They want to talk to them as little as possible like, “Oh, they’re bothering me,” or whatever. Your existing clients and your past clients are your easiest source of revenue. So nurture those relationships.
DBLC: Right. And if something’s wrong then you’d find out and at least fix it.
LCME: That way you can avoid a negative comment about you in the future because you came by and you fixed a problem that they might have otherwise turned into a negative against your company. I think your follow-up strategy is a great idea. I’d even extend that a little bit further. Something that you could do on your website that would be hugely effective is to have a page of thrilled client testimonials.
DBLC: My web guy he is bugging be about that. He’s like, “You’ve got to get me the testimonials!”
LCME: Not text, not just text and their names. If you can’t do anything else, a photo, text, and their name, okay, whatever. But if you are going to this follow-up strategy and you are going to bring flowers by their house. You need to talk to them, have a conversation with them and when they rave about you and say: “No, I love it. Things still look good. It’s been a month and I love it. You guys are awesome!” Your sales guy: “The comments that you made are so nice, do you mind if we shoot a 20-second video and share that with our other users?” Some ladies are going to be like: “No, no, I don’t want to do that.” You are going to get some of that. You don’t have to be push about it, but I guarantee . . .
DBLC: All you need is a few.
LCME: You only need a few. Five good ones. If you make it part of a process and you are constantly doing the follow-up strategy once a month and you are asking people for thrilled customer testimonials. Feature those on your website.
DBLC: So that’s something again I should be tasking the rest of our sales team with staying on top of and reminding.
LCME: Yeah, I would assign them one day a month that they go out and follow-up with clients and closed job. That way you are back in their mind and you’ve done something for them that they are going to talk about to their friends. And maybe a couple of those friends are thinking about getting a pool or a patio.
DBLC: Or they know somebody who is.
LCME: So you are orchestrating referrals, is what you are doing.
DBLC: All right, this was great. In a good way, it’s calming.
LCME: It’s kind of a lot, but I’m actually glad that we got to go really deep on good stuff.
DBLC: I’ve got more out of this than you can believe…
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