Alright, so why don’t we talk about things that people can do to their existing website, what they can do today to help improve their rank and stay in the top 10. Top ten things that they can do to get their existing website rank.
Let’s also kind of, as we talk about it intertwine balancing that with getting results, like getting people to buy.
Of course, yes.
Alright, cool. So what do you think of number one?
Number one I would suggest using a domain with your number one key phrase in it. So if you are a lawn care expert in Dallas, you would want to probably choose something like lawncaredallas.com or lawn servicedallas.com. You would really need to do really good key phrases research as exactly what the number one key phrase is within your geographic region.
Good point. In such we’ll use the lawn care example. It’s is interesting and this is depending on what industry you’re in and there’s got to be similarities to these. What I’m about say, in Texas, the southern market of United States we see a lot of guys that are buying and selling lawn mowing, fertilization weed control, when their potential clients search, they search something like lawn care whereas when you get up in the north. Especially northeast it is very common to see instead of using the term lawn care they use the term landscape even for maintenance services. So and that is true. I see similar trends in other service industries but that’s a really good analysis there.
Exactly right. The key phrase that you may be using in the south or a dozen other geographic regions, whether it’s in America or another country or even within other states, key phrases can vary from state to state, it’s not always going to be the same effect. Since we serve clients all of the US, we see this regularly. And sometimes it actually surprises us but that’s why we do rigorous key phrase research for each and every client and it’s something that you should do for your own site as well.
Since we’re talking about that, do you remember that census research training thing? This is kind of interesting. Sometimes we used to do with census, now you can do it for us. So one of the thing you’re trying to sell, let’s say you have a bunch of key word phrases so you’re buying a domain name that matches where you’re going to go a lot of searches on those phrases?
Yes, one thing that you might consider, I know do this is to look sometimes its census data, make sure even though that area is getting a lot of search volume maybe they don’t even match the demographic the user did five of your best clients. So you’ve got so many opportunities I mean you got so many places you can spend money. So it’s really best to work on the top twenty percent thing, so take your key research and add to it some census research make sure your demographic focus on this first.
Very good point and you really want to make sure that you’re selling to a market that can afford your services.
Absolutely.
If you’re trying to sell a high end maid service, or a specialized lawn care service or a landscaping service, you need to make sure that you’re selling to the right demographic. And that’s something that if you do some market research, if you look at the census data, you can find out what the incomes are in those areas, how many people are living in those areas and get a good basis of how large your market is in that particular area.
And this is really something that you should know before you even starting a business in particular. You should know where you’re going to sell and who you’re going to sell to. And that’s very important to do the market research on an area.
Good. So we go back to the same thing that we talk about in every video. The foundational thing that has to happen is keyword research, from there drives every other decision you’re going to make.
Exactly right.
Okay. So you use that to buy domains. So number two I say would be optimize your on page content. And this would be your copy, this would be the text within the page, this would be the title on the page, this would be the URL that you’re using on the page, your H1 and H2 tags, title tags, alt tags on images, title tags on links, all of these needs to be optimized within the code of your page. And you need to include key phrases in all of these different areas. That includes your title tags, especially includes your page title that’s the number one most important thing, make sure you get the key phrase in the page title. I suggest oftentimes if your targeting multiple key phrases put your company’s name last.
If you ever need it in there at all.
Exactly. If you’re after new leads, they don’t really care about your company’s name. So as long as they’re seeing what they’re searching for. So put those key phrases in your page title. Put them in your header tags, put them in your body copy multiple times in variations, put them in your images, put them in your alt tags, put them in your title tags in all your links in your website be very thorough about this. Your on page optimization is something that you can get one hundred percent right and you should because there’s a whole other lot things that you need to do such as back linking and stuffs that happens off of your site that is even more difficult. So it’s really important that you get the on page stuff one hundred percent.
It’s like the first thing you do. All about keyword research.
Exactly right. And that’s the first place that you start with any project.
Yeah. Next would be to, this is something that you’re really good with, writing, copying content in their code of action, different things like that. You know optimize your content and then maybe you want to talk about some of your different techniques that you used in the past. Some of your tricks in marketing.
Yup. So this is back to the balance of getting results, getting rankings, bringing a lot of traffic at the same time when you put on the effort of getting this traffic there, if you’re site is so focused on just getting them there and you do a poor job of convincing them to stay and read on and ultimately ask for an estimate or ultimately buy then you’ve wasted all money on SEO. So it’s this big balance is give and take on balancing out, getting traffic and then converting that traffic. You do everything just to get rankings. You do everything just to get conversions, it balancing. So that is heavily about writing copy, it’s about being creative, it’s about figuring out the structure of your heading so that they, one of the sayings in marketing, the purpose of the headline is to get them to read the first sentence, the purpose of the first sentence is to get them to read the second sentence. I mean it’s that kind of a concept at every moment they’re reading on your website, you’re on the verge of losing them forever. And they’re going to move on and go somewhere else. So if you have an H1 because it’s an important element in rankings and you put all your effort into just having your keyword phrase in it that’s not necessarily going to solve the service that you’re going to have in your H1 if its just keyphrase if you want to.
Sometimes it does sometimes it doesn’t.
So this is balancing that is so critical to understand. And then from their copy that’s going to be the body, the text of your site your headings your bullet points so I personally would recommend you use direct response techniques. Of you’re not familiar with direct response, there’s a gazillion books on it. Go look up direct response, but the basic concepts of direct response are certain elements, your heading is one of the most critical things of your bullet points throughout your site are very important. Think about how you might read and how most people read is they read and skim and their eye hits something that oh wow this is interesting and then they read on a little bit detail, they read that paragraph, they go back in this skimming the page mode and the they find something else interesting and they read in detail and they skim that’s how the process works. So this is why in addition to a headline, sub heads bullet points are so critical because I don’t know of it’s an American thing but as we skim we tend to read headlines and subheads and bullet points.
Yes.
So that’s the direct response technique. Call it actions what they’re going to do, giving them something like compelling reason to buy it at this moment. All these there’s a whole bunch of, we’re not going to go into them but those are the kind of things that you want to really be building your website and you want to start building your own page right from the beginning. And then you don’t quit doing that stuff when on you’re in subpages, this carries on your entire site. Something else that I’ve really learned again look into the direct response techniques, something more worth saying is really think about your website as a singular focus here’s where I’m going with this. The more you seem to move in this direction the more success you seem going to have. It used to be we have somebody come to our website, you could fill this estimate, you could call us, and you could do ten possible things to get a hold of us. There’s ten possibilities like why don’t you call us now, why don’t you fill up this estimate, why don’t you join our auto responder, why don’t you on and on and on. We have all these things that they can do and they’re just their all want to read our blog. So we’ve really more and more focus on it’s not that we don’t have some of those mechanisms that aren’t there. The core focus of the site is more about pushing and taking more action and favored us generally in estimate form.
Now this brings us to our next point where a stage of things that we also want to do in our website build credibility.
Right.
And you want to do this there are different ways that you can do this but one of the things that we ask our new clients right off the bar is have they won any awards are they involved in any organizations are they ranked the better business bureau we do a lot of lawyers, a lot of them have been featured in TV, in magazines some of them have written books some of them have been interviewed in Good Morning America, some of the things like that.
Of theses we build credibility with your potential leads and new clients something that we also like to include predominantly in our website is videos usually the owner were the operator introducing their content, introducing their service. Putting your personal face in the business. I think it’s very important. Even the employees if you can get them to do interview the employees because they have bigger operation. You get employees that are experts you’ve hired experts in certain of your business. You want to, the whole point of this is to prove to you potential client that you know what you’re doing, you care about their business and you have experts working for you.
If there’s another company in your marketplace that is say can perceive to be like one of the top in the marketplace that whatever service they provide maybe it’s the non competitive service to yours, you can interview them, put them in your website. It links you to them and builds credibility because you’re now being linked to this most recognized business in the marketplace again not a competition with you. And then what you can do for their business the reason that they wanted to do this interview is they see you on your website and it gets them more traffic gets them more potential clients so there’s always a whole kind of ways that you can link yourself to other experts and then of course by flat out teaching, showing on your website demonstrating how your operation works you can make yourself look like an expert in your industry as well.
Very good point.
You need not know what you’re talking about
But if you are an expert you need to let people know.
Very good point.
And along with creating videos of your place and stuffs online lot of clients have actually gone in producing commercials. Not all of them appeared on TV, some of our clients in New York are running advertisements in the New York taxis. And we always recommend any video like that you shot that we could reuse in our SEO work and on your website that is valuable to us as well. It works great we recommend it. And as we’ve mentioned in our other videos putting videos in your site keeps them in your site longer. And that in turn also helps increase your rank and let’s say, since this is such a good topic, testimonials, if you think about the testimonial value and order, and first is a written testimonial of your full name possibly their occupation in what city and state they live and preferably a photo of the actual person. Yes that will be like level two, testimonial plus photo, third is like testimonial and voice audio where they call in a number and leave an audio for you to play. And then the ultimate is again video, right now for our company we’ve got a guy going out to our clients. To four or five of our clients’ homes, sitting in their kitchens with them interviewing them on their video about our company.
Fantastic idea. We recommend that to all of our clients some of them are kind of weary about doing it but it proves great results every time. Testimonials matter. And just as you said the ultimate is having real videos of your clients raving abut your service and how satisfied they are with what you’ve provided them.
I would do a range something that I’ve been thinking about this topic because we’re doing it. Our approach is we want a range of ages, thirties to fifties and that we get some diversity men and women and then on top of that we want the testimonials to answer one of our most common objectives. If most people are afraid that you’re not going to show up, you’re not going to actually answer the phone past the time you made the sell. You want an answer because your sales guy already wanted to get the commission and once you’ve chosen the company that is going to take care of us even more. So we would testimonial that can kind of we’d ask questions in the interview to get the testimonial to make sure that testimonial answers the objective and if you’ve found answer and it is about price and we want that next testimonial to answer why price is completely irrelevant with our companies and non issue. Its way better to have your clients answering objections than yourselves. People are answering the objections.
Exactly right. And this is another great topic that has reviews and testimonies. This is something that I want to go in even more depth in one of our other videos. It’s a very broad topic and there’s a lot that can be done and it’s incredibly valuable. I can’t just after our clients and the ones that have take the time to do it and aggressively tried to get review from the satisfied customers they see the benefits. If it matters, do it. Another note I would also say that testimonials and reviews they go hand in hand. The testimonials tend to be more on your site.
Well, there are reviews and testimonials too. When we were talking about testimonials we were probably more talking about what you’re going to put on your site. Whereas reviews are on the next site like you open.
In Google.
Right that’s correct. And what we do, what I’m speaking of is we like to add on our clients site especially ones who don’t have a lot of credibility building factors is if there’s not one magazine cover that we can put in their main page or there’s not awards that we can feature in their main page.
And I think a lot of companies have that.
Yeah, well what we like to do is, we like to put actual images of Google in the faster ranking logo, we like to put a logo of Yale in the faster ranking logo. So in this search, all is different, all is a different idea. All is about publicity sites where you can get reviews. What we’d like to do is that their logo the ranking the average ranking that we get below their logo in actual been linked form our website opening into a new window they are actually review page. So that does two things, that shows that people are happy with your servers, and they are leaving positive reviews and they’re recommending you to other possible potential customers and it actually makes easy for your existing clients to come to your website and leave reviews for you because a lot of our customers cant see the videos of other clients or cant see this early.
That will cost money.
Yeah. Or it’s not always easy to get testimonials aside from your clients but you can do different things and get them to leave positive reviews maybe you can maybe give them a discount of some sort or something like that.
Be careful with that stuff, the FTC is like destroying companies over testimonials that, yeah.
If it’s done be careful about it don’t go overboard. But if you have a new Google page or a new Yelp page and you don’t have any reviews, it’s important that you get some reviews. So put some effort into it. Ask your potential clients for it. Another thing I’d like to mention is that it’s just good business to be communicating with your clients. And not just getting positive reviews from them but you should. Before you were even doing any of this, with this school of mine you should be communicating with your clients on a regular basis. Anyway, following up on the service that you provided, asking them questions if they’re happy with their service, if they’re happy with the technicians or whoever is performing the service, if they’re happy with the performance that they got from them. And actually finding out if you’re actually providing a good service in the first place. You’d be surprised at how many customers are surprised that you’re getting negative reviews. And there is one really simple way to troubleshoot that and that is to talk to your clients. Talk to them, ask them after you’ve performed a service, follow up with a phone call, find out what they thought about the service. You’ll Find out really quick over the phone if they weren’t happy with the service. And that does a couple of different things. One that will keep you from losing a valuable client because they’re not going to be calling and tell you most of the time, hey your service suck, I’m not going to come back. They’re just never going to come back. But if you follow up their service with a phone call you’ll find out, one if your technician or the person performing the service is doing a good job and two you’ll find out if you’re about to lose a client. An d if you’re about to lose a client that phone call follow up might very well save you from losing that client because you’ll know that your performance on that last project or the service call it was lackluster and now is your opportunity to make up for that and keep the client. And you’d be surprised how many of your clients don’t know that. And we always recommend that.
What you’re saying is so incredibly powerful, in fact we have feature coming in being your service in autopilot, who will automatically survey your clients.
Very important, talk to your clients.
Since you finished your job in a month or whatever, we do it all automatically because we found exactly the same thing you’re saying. It’s so critical you could get ahead of the curb if you know the problem. Knowing if a problems’ coming plus they’ll feel like you’re listening, you’re paying attention and then when you survey them or you talk to them on the phone and they say, oh no, you guys are awesome, you’re always here, the guys are on my property or something like that.
A segue to personal testimonial. That’s fantastic. Can we record a testimonial? There you go.
It’s so easy then to call a customer and say, hey could I get a testimonial from you? That’s awkward but after they say, oh that’s well, thank you so much. Do you mind if we use that? So much easier.
Exactly right. I know it sounds difficult but if you’re willing to put in the effort. It’s worth the effort you put in. it pays back.
Yup. Totally agree. I think we’re on seven?
Yup. Let’s talk about landing pages, sales pages.
So this should be like your subpages on your website.
Yes, they would just be on your site, they would be detailed oftentimes they would be detailed about what particular service you’re catering to.
A service or a key word phrase. ?
Both. So say you’re a tree service company, there’s a couple different services hat you probably offer. Tree trimming, deep root fertilization, there’s a whole bunch of stuff. Stump removal a lot of different things like that. And there are key phrases associated with each of those services. And so your landing page would really be a sort of a doorway that people would ranking Google for that particular key phrase and service and that’s going to be the first page that people see when they come to your website. So you want to do on these pages, you want to do all the things that we’re talking about here just like every other page in your website and it should be but the copy and all that content on this site should be focused on that one particular key phrase. That’s why people are on that page. They want to be sold on that particular service. So all your copy and everything should feed into that and of course that page is going to have your call of action as well. And they’re going to click your info and you’re going to follow up and you’re going to put the sale on them.
Its get’s almost as much effort as your own page.
Yes. Because its your home page there’s so many searches because it’s the first page they’ll land on.
Exactly right. But you really want to think about just about all of pages except for maybe your privacy policies being as important as your next because they’re all potentially on your first page.
Exactly true.
Speaking of which for your subpages don’t just copy them or and change the key words in them.
No. we’ve talked about this before. They got to be unique it takes effort. It takes our copywriters are busy all day every day but it’s a necessity and is expensive to write original copy for all the different pages I mean we’re tired of reading twenty plus key phrases on all these sites. Its takes us a lot of time to write twenty pages on services. It takes twenty different ways. It’s a lot of work. Our copywriters are really good a t what they do. And they stay very busy dealing with it. And then this actually went to next point which is to have a fresh unique content. You want to have unique content on your pages and it needs to be new, it needs to be fresh, it needs to be updated, the content on your website should be the same as it was as you put your website five years ago. it should be the same as it was when you put your website up a year ago, it needs change every couple of week, every couple months, whatever’s required for the market that you’re targeting. A great way to do this is to blog, we recommend our clients to blogs, keep productive updated at least once a month, maybe every two weeks, maybe every once a week depending how competitive your industry is. And also working key phrases into each and every single blog, page titles in every blog post, videos, just like of all the other pages you’re going to reuse the same techniques on all the pages on your site including the blogs.
The blogs are the way to go because once you optimize your home page and your sub pages you can’t be screwing with that stuff because you figured out the message market, you’ve figured out the way to convert so you can’t be tweaking that all the time to achieve this and so that’s why blog is the easiest way to introduce fresh content. And so why does Google care? That’s why you’re doing it because people want fresh content but every page on your site is potentionally a main page in your site. Every blog post is the first page that people see on your site.
Same with the blog post. There are so many different variations on different search terms that people can be searching for and you’ll be surprised what people are searching for when talking about services. Not always what you think it might be.
No, there are some obscure terms and they call them long tell terms. Like obscure terms that don’t get a lot phrase or don’t get a lot of search volume but you would never be able to justify the because the SEO is going to optimize the pages that are going to get sixty hits a month.
Sure. It’s a blogger to video that kind of stuff is awesome for that.
Yup. Next point video we’ve already mentioned that were big proponents of it. It works great. Now just for testimonials we also recommend shooting a video of each staff performance service introducing your staff, teaching about how you perform service and maybe how inspect what you look for and here’s the ten check point we go through every time we perform, here’s the thing we go to being prepared to provide exceptional service once they are on your property. Things you think are common and no big deal and even things that everybody in the industry does. Everybody does it but you could be the first company that declares one of the unique things you do.
Exactly right.
Anything, you care about whatever business you’re in and you know it inside out but the guy who bought it from you doesn’t care about it, doesn’t think about it except when he’s got to have it. He knows nothing about it. So almost everything you tell him is going to be new and fresh to him and it sets you up to be the expert. Videos are awesome.
It is great. Think of it as another way to really differentiate yourself from the competition. We recommend a lot of things that your competitions are not doing some of them might come around eventually but there out after a few weeks or month which is exactly awesome.
Yes. That is good for us. These things are recommended it’s all about setting yourself apart from the competition. This is what it is all about. I think the final thing would be talk about tracking, testing analytics.
We’re big proponents of that. In analytics you want to, there are a number of programs out there that will help you track your ranking pages that you’re doing. There are a couple of programs that we use that are really reliable. So we know in a week whether you’re moving up or down in rankings, so whatever particular key phrase this week would determine the best for your business industry. Along with that you recommend you use an analytics package, Google has a free one that’s really good. You can get really deep with the data there. And it’s tied back with Adwords if you do paperclip.
Exactly right. And it will tell you exactly where your traffic is coming from. A lot of information about them such as the kind of computer they’re browsing on, screen resolution. Stuff that you develop first, we’d like to know that help them create a better website and better browsing experience for your customers but most importantly it tells you which pages are delivering what people are searching for, which pages aren’t, what’s the most popular, how long the people are staying in virtual pages. So if you have a page and you have a two minute video and people are staying on them for twenty seconds, you have a video problem. Your page is not selling properly.
That’s where the links come from it really gives you the information about visitor’s behavior. What’s interesting them, what’s working, what’s not, and that lets you go back and tweak some more and then test it again and the analytics is one way and the back page is the click pages. People look at it.
Analytics is a big deal. Unlike everything in life, you set it up and you don’t actually use it or look at its kind of useless so you need to have a calendar to take a look at it every so often. What you recommend, how often people should date, how often people should take a look at this.
We look at that data for a week, at least once a month it will be worth the while to check up on. And again that’s going to depend on how much traffic you’re getting , if you’re a brand new site, you’re going to be getting six to ten hits a week. It’s going to be hard to really test until you’re getting some more significant traffic. It’s something that you should be tracking.
I want to say something you said, I want to say it again, because it’s so incredibly important once you start getting traffic you look at your analytics you look at , let’s say fifteen pages, you look at the top two that are getting hits. What are the top three that are getting hits the most? What are the top three and you then focus on those three. You work on those three pages. Now analytics aren’t going to tell you they’re converting, you could type back in the Google adwords you could figure out what they’re converting which page your converting from this and stuff the point is if you realize that ten percent if you look at the top ten of your page that are viewed, those are the ones that you put effort in, those are the ones that you put video in, those are the ones you focused on and improved and improved. It really helps you narrow down where to spend your time.
Analytics is really helpful and it’s free.
Very good point. Tracking, testing, we’ve talked about that stuff a million times. I mean we’ve talked about it enough.
Now the thing I like about analytics in Google is you can really narrow it down to the geography where your searches are coming from. That is important which is important. Something that if you’re getting a lot if significant traffic and you’re doing business in a certain geographic area and you really drill down to see where your searches are coming from. You might find that a lot of your searches are in areas that your not yet servicing but that’s how you find it through your Google welcome page or through your search. Or maybe they’re interested in your service and there are in an area that you are not yet providing service there. And that’s something that can help you find out as well.
Yeah. That’s a good point. It’s a good deal.
Anything else?
Let’s get started.
Sounds good.
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