Are you a business that focuses on your local area? If so, then this video is for you because I go deep with local marketing expert Greg Gifford.
What we cover
In this video, we cover the following:
- Minute 05 – The difference between nationwide and local marketing
- Minute 06:10 – How searches change based on where you’re located
- Minute 7:25 – My pizza story – why local SEO is important
- Minute 11:25 – I do some searches in my area to show differences in volume
- Minute 14:47 – How Google is kind of like a toddler
- Minute 23 – Google My Business
- Minute 25 – Does content matter for local businesses?
- Minute 31 – Will a non local area phone number hurt my local SEO rankings?
- Minute 32 – Does an address?
- Minute 37 – Why $500 a month is way too little to pay for SEO (or any other digital channels)
- Minute 38 – Why a local business should not be spending less than $2,500/mo. The math just doesn’t work.
- Minute 39 – Why “how much should we spend” is the wrong question to ask.
- Minute 41 – It’s not about how many leads you need, it’s which type of leads you want so then you can determine the right budget.
- Minute 43 – What I’ve learned about pitching work and pricing it (for the agencies out there.
About Greg
Greg is an experienced Local SEO consultant specializing in the automotive industry. An experienced conference speaker, his movie-themed slide decks are always audience favorites.
Find him:
Full transcript
Coming soon…
John Doherty:
Hello, everyone. Welcome back once again. My name is John Doherty. I’m the founder and CEO over here at Credo, where we help great companies find and hire the right digital marketing agency. Speaking of digital marketing agencies, I have one with me today.
John Doherty:
I’m trying to develop a lot more content like this by digital marketing agencies talking with me, talking with you, educating you about marketing, how do you budget for marketing? How do you think about doing marketing for your business? And today we’re focusing specifically on local businesses.
John Doherty:
So I’ve been thinking about local businesses a lot. And by local, I mean like location bound businesses. So you might be in one location, in Dallas, right? Where my friend Greg who’s with me is located, or you might have locations in five different states, in different cities. But basically your business serves people in a specific geographic area.
John Doherty:
So maybe you’re a dentist or you’re an HVAC company, or you’re a real-estate agent or you’re an auto-dealer or something like that. So those are the kinds of businesses that we’re talking to here. So today I have with me Greg Gifford, who is with SearchLab Digital. So Greg is an old friend of mine actually in the digital marketing industry. Man, we’ve known each other, what? 10, 11, 12 years, something like that.
Greg Gifford:
Yeah, easy.
John Doherty:
It’s been a long time. Our dogs have played together. Our kids have played together. It’s a long running friendship, relationship. But Greg is the guy when it comes to local businesses and local digital marketing. He’s got a long storied history. So I’m super, super happy to have him here today. We’re going to get into the conversation here in just a second.
John Doherty:
But Greg, if you would, introduce yourself to the audience, tell us who you are, tell us your quick background and tell us what you love doing when it comes to marketing local businesses.
Greg Gifford:
So like he said, I’m Greg, I’m the VP of Search at SearchLab. We’re a boutique agency, and all we do is locally focus marketing. I’m lucky enough to be a popular speaker, so I get to speak at conferences all over the world. Not so much lately, thanks to COVID. But when COVID hit last year, even though it was only March, when they started closing events down, I already had 28 conferences booked in eight different countries.
Greg Gifford:
So I get to go all over the world on a lot of cool trips. And I really do that not as much for business because we only really serve customers in North America. We could do international customers, but really I do that because I love to help people be better. Hey, if you’re not going to buy for me at least don’t buy from somebody that you’re going to waste your money.
Greg Gifford:
I want to speak at these conferences to help people understand, here’s what it takes to be better and grow your business. You know I was speaking at Pubcon last week in Florida, and the other guy presenting with me was Damon Gochneaur, another guy that we’re all friends with. And one thing that he said, that’s great about working with local businesses really kind of hit home is that, you’re not working with some multinational corporation, that it’s just a line item.
Greg Gifford:
When you help somebody grow their business, they get to buy a bigger house, or buy a better car, or put their kids through college. So you’re making a real world on somebody’s life. And so that really kind of hit home, because that’s really what it is. I enjoy helping people be better because it really affects those people’s lives.
John Doherty:
Yeah, that’s awesome. I love that. And it’s funny, you mentioned Damon because the shirt I’m wearing today, Damon actually sent me from his [inaudible 00:03:14] in Dallas. So shout out to Damon there at Spiro Digital. So yeah. Greg, today, we’re obviously talking about local marketing. We’re talking about digital marketing for local businesses.
John Doherty:
Obviously local businesses they often have like a physical location. Maybe they have a sign out front, that kind of thing. They’re getting more referrals from local people. But when it comes down to getting found online, as a local business, what is different about local marketing? We’re going to talk a lot about SEO, search engine optimization, and Google ads, pay-per-click, Facebook ads, that sort of thing.
John Doherty:
What is different about that than like a nationwide, just digital business is going to be doing? Right? Because my background is all with working with nationwide, right? Like companies. I did some local years ago, but it was like scale thousands of hotels.
Greg Gifford:
Sure.
John Doherty:
So, we can talk about franchise if we want to, but what is different about local specific marketing than nationwide campaigns? What’s the mindset that people need to kind of adopt when it comes to investing in digital for local?
Greg Gifford:
Well, it’s a different way of looking at things, because most of the time businesses know I need to do digital marketing, and it’s just digital marketing as a whole. And there’s subsets in there. You’ve got paid search, you’ve got social media ads, and you’ve got SEO. But in each of those areas, there’s still a difference between not having a geographic focus and having a geographic focus.
Greg Gifford:
Most people are going to look at SEO. I need to do some stuff to my website to get it to show up better in Google, or I need to do paid search ads that will show up in Google. And they don’t think about any sort of geographic focus, because a lot of businesses, if you’re an e-commerce business, you’re a nationwide business, you just need to show up.
Greg Gifford:
But if you’re an HVAC guy in Dallas, or a car dealer in Denver, or a plastic surgeon in LA, you don’t really… I’m sure maybe somebody might fly across the country to see you if you’re a plastic surgeon, but for car dealerships, for doctors, for dentists, for HVAC guys, for plumbers and electricians, you don’t need to show up outside of area, you only need to show up in one particular geographic area.
Greg Gifford:
So there’s different things that you need to do with your ads, whether it’s Google ads, or social ads, and with SEO, it’s actually a different algorithm in Google that returns those results. So it’s different signals that the algorithm looks at. So some sort of SEO is always going to be beneficial. But if you did like a Venn diagram where you’ve got a circle here for the traditional SEO, and a circle here for SEO that focuses on local, the area of overlap is what benefits you.
Greg Gifford:
But if you really need local SEO and you’re doing regular SEO, it’s just that sliver, that overlaps where if you do local SEO, you’re including all these additional signals that regular SEO doesn’t look at. And the way that I like to illustrate this is, it’s easier to think of real world examples.
Greg Gifford:
So if your office is in downtown and you sit down at your computer, open up Google, type in two words, pizza delivery, you get a list of the pizza spots that are right there by your office. But then let’s say you live in the suburbs 30-minutes away. You can do that same search when you go home at night with the same two words and you get completely different results.
Greg Gifford:
And most people don’t really think about that, because you’re not going to do a search like that, but you could type the exact same search phrase into Google and get vastly different results based on your location. Because Google understands, if I need a pizza delivered, it’s not going to be showing me the pizza place in Detroit that has the best website in the entire world, because I’m not going to get a pizza delivered from there. It’s only going to show me localized results.
Greg Gifford:
So it uses those extra signals, and that’s where people can kind of start to go. “Okay. Yeah. That makes sense”. If you’re a plumber or an HVAC guy, you don’t need to show up across the entire state, you need to show up in the town that you can actually service.
John Doherty:
Right. Totally. Yeah. And just thinking about like myself as a buyer, I live in Denver, Colorado, right? And basically like downtown is here, I live here and my in-laws live out here. Funny story for you is a year or so ago, my in-laws, they had just moved into a new house, and my mother-in-law ordered pizza for us to pick up on our way to their house.
John Doherty:
So this chain, it’s like, it’s a Denver local chain. They have two, three different locations. There’s one in Cherry Creek, which is on the other side of downtown for me, and then there’s one out like basically Westminster, which is on the way to my in-law’s house. She ordered from the one in Cherry Creek, which is the opposite direction. And we only found that out when we went to the one in Westminster, right?
Greg Gifford:
And they didn’t have your pizza.
John Doherty:
And they didn’t have our pizza. Right? And he’s like, “Oh, well that went to cherry Creek”. I’m like, “Well, I’m not driving 30 minutes that way to pick up a freaking pizza, then drive 50 minutes back”. Right? It’s like “I want it here”. So, super, super important.
John Doherty:
I think an interesting thing that you brought up Greg at the start there was, like let’s talk auto for a second, because I’m a car guy and you’re the auto dealership SEO guy. In the industry like a year ago, a year and a half ago, I was looking for a new car. Right? My old car, my old 2008 Audi was not on its last legs, but had a lot of miles and I was looking to get something bigger. And we just bought property up in the mountains.
John Doherty:
I was like, “All right, I’m going to get pickup truck”. And so, I was looking and I didn’t necessarily need the dealer that is 10 minutes up Federal Boulevard from me, the Toyota dealer there. I wanted to see where are all the Toyota Tacomas in basically the Metro area. Right?
John Doherty:
And actually, I mean, this was last year before we even used cars went crazy. I actually ended up buying it from a place up in Greeley. I found it on Facebook marketplace. Right? Well, once again, that’s local and yeah, it’s 15 minutes away, 45 minutes away, but they had the truck that I wanted, that I’d been looking for for three months, I was willing to drive 50 minutes to go buy it. Right?
John Doherty:
But I didn’t care that they are in the Sloan’s Lake Area of Denver, West Denver, I just cared that they were in the Denver Metro Area and I could go get it. Right? And so that’s kind of the mindset for thinking about it. And I, a lot of times talking with businesses, especially local businesses or any type, that they focus on kind of the fringe. It’s like, “But I’m a Porsche dealer. What about the people that are looking for the specific Porsche that I have in Denver?”
John Doherty:
Okay. That’s fine. But if you look at all the auto, like the auto aggregators, right? And I used to work in real estate. So like the auto versions of Zillow, et cetera, the CarGurus, Autotrader’s et cetera, a lot of them are going to allow you to get outside of like, you can search within 50 miles, and I can also search nationwide, because if I’m a Porsche collector, and there’s five of them per sale in the country, and I have the money to buy that Porsche, I’m going to be willing to fly there and buy it. Right?
Greg Gifford:
But you’re also going to find it no matter.
John Doherty:
[crosstalk 00:09:51] local people. Right. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. So basically market to the people that are within your area, right? Your 25 miles, your 50 miles, whatever that is, because the people that really want to find you are still going to find you.
Greg Gifford:
Or the other way to look at it too is, take a couple of your keywords and do searches for the phrases that either you know are important to your business, or if it’s a different phrase that a customer would search for, that you’d want to show up for that, search for some of those, and don’t enter any sort of geographic phrase.
Greg Gifford:
So don’t say, Toyota dealer Denver, just say Toyota dealer, or just say used car dealer, or just say HVAC repair, or just say toilet repair, plumbing, whatever those phrases might be for your business. Even when you don’t include a geographic modifier like near me or nearby, or using a neighborhood or a city or even a state, Google’s going to just default to showing you stuff in your local area anyway, because Google knows where you’re located, and that’s where you can see, “Okay, Google’s using this local algorithm for my business, that’s actually the kind of marketing I need to do”.
Greg Gifford:
Even though you might have aspirations of, I want to sell to anybody in the country. Those people are going to find you, if they’re going to find you, but you can’t change the way that Google is treating your business.
John Doherty:
Exactly. Yeah. I just searched Toyota dealer in Google. I’m based in Denver, I’m logged into Google, they have my IP, et cetera. They know my favorite pizza order. They know everything about me. And I find, I get two ads. One is a local dealership, the other one’s Carvana. But then the very first organic result above the local, the Map Pack, I get toyota.com certified Toyota dealers in Denver, Colorado. Right? I literally just searched Toyota dealer. Right?
John Doherty:
So yeah, I think that’s a great call. And if you’re a local business, go and do a search, don’t even type in the location, don’t type near me. None of that, just type Toyota dealer, type HVAC installer, whatever kind of business you are and see, kind of what’s showing up there, that starts to drive your marketing there.
John Doherty:
So Greg, to zoom back out a little bit, as a local business is getting going, obviously there’s like stages of local businesses right there. Your VSPs, your small mom-and-pop shops, that kind of thing, like quickly, what should they be doing? But then as you get bigger, right? Say you’re an HVAC dealer, you got 20 different salespeople out in the field and you’re installing AC units all over Dallas or Denver or whatever.
John Doherty:
At kind of a higher level, how should people be thinking? How should local businesses be thinking about digital marketing as in the channels that they should be investing in? Where do they start when they’re looking to grow? How do they sequence thinking about channels? When should they start with SEO? When should they start with Google ads, Bing ads, right? Let’s talk about Bing ads, for sure, and local. And then also, social. What are the different areas that they should be thinking about there? How should they sequence for it? And then we’re going to talk about budgeting as well.
Greg Gifford:
So the way that I always look at it is, you’ve got to start with your website. And that typically means you’ve got to do SEO first, because it doesn’t really do much good to start paying for ads that are going to drive traffic to your site, if your site sucks, because then it’s not going to convert that customer. So you’ve got to have a great website experience first, so that those people that you’re paying to get to your site, find the answer they’re looking for and have confidence that you’re the right person to do business with.
John Doherty:
So what are the common things that you see local businesses getting wrong on their websites that they need to fix before they start driving traffic there?
Greg Gifford:
Well, I mean, I just talked to a guy earlier today, and he didn’t have a phone number on his website, and you had to really dig around, and he didn’t have contact us as a main menu button, which you should always have. Because if people have questions and they don’t want to call you, they’re going to want to email you. So make contact easy to find.
Greg Gifford:
But you want your phone number to be up in the header of the site. so that it’s clearly visible on every page. And on mobile, make sure that that number is clickable, so that they don’t… Because if I’m on a mobile device, if I’m searching on this and your site pops up, but I can’t click on the number and have it dial, then I have to switch back and forth between my phone app and my website app to type in the first three numbers, then switch back, see the next three, switch back, then do the last one four. Don’t make it hard for people to contact you.
Greg Gifford:
So think about the concept that’s on your site. And this talks to the question too, about, like you said, for the smaller mom-and-pops, what do you do first? I always like to try to boil things down to the simplest concept, because it helps people that don’t understand digital marketing have a better handle, and for the people that do understand it, a lot of times they get so in the weeds on the details that they forget the big picture.
Greg Gifford:
So when you boil down to the simple concept, it helps everybody get on the same page. And the simple concept is, Google’s kind of like a toddler. It’s very curious and wants to know a lot about a lot of different things, but it doesn’t really have deep knowledge about what you do. So it’s like holding your toddler’s hand and explaining something.
Greg Gifford:
You’ve got to have it really obvious who you are, what you do, why you’re awesome, and where you are on your site. And then it also taking that next leap, Google’s that curious child. If you really boil Google down to the simplest concept, Google is really just a pattern detection. Google’s algorithm is looking at different factors and establishing a pattern, and if a site has a better pattern than another site, then it shows up higher in the search results.
Greg Gifford:
So to have a better pattern means you’re doing digital marketing, whether it’s ads or website or whatnot, so that you stand out from your competitors, you have a better pattern than your competitors. And when it comes to the content side, a lot of people have the same generic BS content that’s on all their competitors sites. So you don’t stand out.
Greg Gifford:
If you have the same content and a lot of small businesses they just kind of do that. They don’t really know what to do. So they’re going to find a competitor that they like and kind of copy the same content. Or if you’re using a provider. If you’re using a provider that does websites for dentists, or websites for car dealers, or websites for doctors, or whatever it might be, that provider is probably going to just put some default content on your site. Then you have the same thing as everybody else.
Greg Gifford:
So the easiest way to think about content is, if you want to show up as a search result, if you want a page on your website to show up as a search result for something that someone typed into Google, you need a page of content on your site about that concept. It doesn’t have to be a perfect keyword to keyword match, but if I’m looking for HVAC repair and I’m a company that does HVAC repair among a lot of other things, I don’t want to have one page that says, “Here’s all the stuff that I do”.
Greg Gifford:
I need a page for every service or every product that I sell. So I have a page about that concept, so that I have a page on my site that answers the question or answers the needs that that potential customer might have. And that’s really the biggest mistake that I see is people just, they’ll have one or two pages on their site with a bunch of bullet points of here’s all the things that we do.
Greg Gifford:
Using the HVAC example, I don’t need to know that you can install a brand new system. I don’t need a brand new system.
John Doherty:
Right.
Greg Gifford:
My coolant went out and I need you to fix the compressor in the coolant. And if you just have we install HVAC, I’m probably going to move on to the next guy that does have a page that says, “Yeah, we’ll come out and give you a new compressor and refill your coolant, and you’re good to go”.
John Doherty:
Totally. Totally. Yeah. Yeah. I just had to get my HVAC replaced last year and I think we got a Daikin, is the brand that we got. And I don’t even remember how we found the people. But if I’m an HVAC provider in the Denver area, yeah, I’m going to be optimizing towards like, HVAC, Denver, those sorts of things. But I’m also going to have, for people that are a little bit more… They’ve been doing their research, et cetera. Right?
John Doherty:
They talk to a few people. As like, “Okay, I know I want to get a Daikin so let me find a Daikin dealer, right? Someone that can install that for me. Right? But also most people are not that educated. I was not that educated. Right? I didn’t know, do we need a new system or can we repair this one? Well, actually I did know that we needed to replace it, because the people that came out the previous year told me that like, “Hey, as of this December 31st, we’re not allowed to repair these anymore in the Denver area”.
Greg Gifford:
Oh really?
John Doherty:
Okay, cool. I mean, it came with the house. Right? I knew it was a little bit old. So like, “Okay. We have to get a new system next year”. So I knew that, so then I got someone out to tell us and consult with us on like, how do we get more air upstairs and that kind of thing. Right? So basically what you’re saying is having levels of, what are people searching for? What could they be searching for? What are the questions they’re asking you? Right?
John Doherty:
Ask your salespeople, “Hey, what are the questions you most commonly get?” Right? Do I need a new system or can I repair my old system? Okay. You need to have a page about that. Right? You need to have that in your FAQ. Something like that. Thinking really about, not what do you want to communicate to them, but how do you answer what they are asking of you?
Greg Gifford:
Well, and it’s taking the blinders off too, because on the smaller side, you’re the business owner and operator, it may be like you and your wife, or just you running the store and that’s it. And you have to wear a bunch of different hats, or on the higher side, there’s a lot of different people involved, but on both sides of things, you’ve got your either owner or your market or blinders on.
Greg Gifford:
You’re on that side all the time. You understand the industry because that’s your job. But you got to understand using your example of HVAC, people don’t buy a new HVAC system every year. You get one every 10 to 15 years, right?
John Doherty:
Right.
Greg Gifford:
So chances are somebody getting a new unit, they’ve never done that before in their life. If your site is full of all this jargon and all the ways that you talk about it, but it doesn’t have a simple, “Hey, my air conditioning doesn’t work, what do I do? How do you know if you need a new one or a replacement?” If you don’t have those general things, great example here on this one.
Greg Gifford:
I work with a lot of car dealerships, so I’ve got a lot of history there. Car dealerships, like to say that they sell pre-owned vehicles. Because it just sounds nicer than used cars. In fact, Mercedes goes so far as to tell their dealers, they’re not allowed to use the term used cars, they have to use pre-owned vehicles, because the connotation is better.
Greg Gifford:
Most dealers will call it pre-owned vehicles. The problem is the general public never uses that term. The general public searches for used cars. So if you look at various SEO tools, if we want to get in the weeds, if you look for, I don’t even remember the numbers, but it’s something like 225 times the search volume on used cars than what you get on pre-owned vehicles.
Greg Gifford:
So that you to take those marketing blinders off and figure out what are the questions customers are asking, or how are the… I mentioned earlier, what are those people going to look for that you want to show up for? Not particularly the name of your service or the name of your brand, because sometimes they’re going to end up needing to buy your product or service, but that’s not their initial search.
Greg Gifford:
Their initial search is, I have a problem, I need a solution. And as they do research, they then figure out what they need. So you’ve got to think about the user side and how’s that person going to look for you, so that you can create the right kind of content and optimize it the right way on your site, so you’re going to show up as a search result.
John Doherty:
Totally. I just did the search pre-owned Toyota versus used Toyota. And obviously I’m getting all like Denver results. Pre-owned Toyota, Keywords Everywhere told me it had 6,600 searches a month, used Toyota has 22,200. SO it’s like four times the search volume. Right? I’m sure for others it’s a lot more. But yeah. Putting yourself in the customer seat once again, it’s what are they asking of you and how do you answer that? Not what do you want to tell them?
Greg Gifford:
Exactly.
John Doherty:
And yes, branding is important, and the language you use, I mean, Mercedes they’re high end, right? So they’re going to go for pre-owned versus like Toyota. I mean, they’re all showing up here of all the local Toyota dealerships plus there’s Honda advertising in there. They’re going to use used because, there’s a whole like stretch of Toyotas.
John Doherty:
You got your ultra luxury, but you also have your entry. Camry’s best selling car in the country for what? The last six years Greg, something like that?
Greg Gifford:
Something like that, yeah.
John Doherty:
It’s crazy. Yeah. But their brand doesn’t matter. They’re not going for the high end of, Mercedes or Porsche or Audi or someone like that. Really important to take into account. So let’s get a little bit into the weeds here, and let’s talk about how do you actually do SEO for local businesses? We talked at kind of a high level about like nationwide SEO and local SEO and like, two different circles and the overlap.
John Doherty:
There’s a little bit of overlap for sure. Right? And I talk about SEO as like, it was kind of three core tenets to SEO technical, content, links, right?
Greg Gifford:
Yep.
John Doherty:
Same in local SEO, but how those look for local SEO is different. So can you unpack that for us a little bit?
Greg Gifford:
Yep. So A, you still have technical content and links, but you have a fourth one that is location, because if you’re a local business, you’re going to have a Google My Business listing. So there’s two types of local businesses. You’ve got the brick and mortar, where a customer is going to come to your physical location to do business with you, to buy your product or service.
John Doherty:
That’s your local coffee shop.
Greg Gifford:
Right. Or you have a service business like an HVAC guy, or a plumber, or an electrician, where they may have an office, or they may not, but they’re going to come to your office or to your home, and service you there. Either type of business needs local SEO. And so you have to have that Google My Business listing, which is what allows you to show up in the Map Pack in Google search results or in Google Maps.
Greg Gifford:
And it’s also that kind of extra entity signal to Google that says, “Hey, look, this guy really is located in Denver and he’s not really a guy in Boulder that’s trying to show up in Denver, that once a customer finds him is like, “Well, I’m not going to drive the 40 minutes up to Boulder, I want somebody that’s down the street from me”.
Greg Gifford:
So you have to understand the Google My Business side, and part of that, Google My Business side is also customer reviews. Because yeah, customer reviews are important for any business, product or service, but when it comes to local businesses, your reviews actually play into Google’s ranking algorithm.
Greg Gifford:
So you want to have a good review process to make sure that you’re getting customer reviews. You want to make sure that they’re making it easy for customers to leave reviews. You’re asking everybody and you’re responding to reviews, et cetera, et cetera. And then when it comes to the technical. Technical is still pretty much the same between the two, but when it comes to content, like I mentioned earlier, you got to have that page of content about that product or service or that concept.
Greg Gifford:
But you also have to optimize the content the right way. And you kind of hit on it a minute ago where a lot of people, if you’re doing HVAC repair, you’re going to say, “I do HVAC repair in Denver”. You’re going to target that. So as you’re optimizing your title tag, your H1 heading, your content, your alt text on your images, your URL, your meta-description, all those standard SEO elements of, “I need to go make sure my keyword phrases in these places” it’s no longer just the keyword phrase. It’s the keyword phrase and the geolocation phrase that you need to include everywhere. So it’s a different way of optimizing.
Greg Gifford:
Then when it comes to links… Well also on the content side too, another thing that’s important is building local relevancy. So it’s not just having that keyword in a few places. It’s making sure that your content is actually about your business, but that it’s also clear that you’re in that local area.
Greg Gifford:
So it’s not like you just mentioned Denver a couple of times, but maybe you’re mentioning some landmarks or directions or other things that show that you’re really in that area. And then also, when it comes to blog content, with local SEO, a lot of times it’s beneficial to write blog content that’s just about the local area and doesn’t even have anything to do with the business.
Greg Gifford:
Because if you’ve got 150 plumbers that are trying to show up in Denver for plumbing, and they all have exactly the same sort of content, but then you’ve got this other guy and he’s like, “Yeah, here’s why it’s important to pay attention to your plumbing, because in Denver, we get a lot of cold weather and you’re going to have a bigger chance of busted pipes. And so blah, blah, blah, blah, blah”.
Greg Gifford:
Or, “Hey, if you’re driving up and you’ve got a house up in Summit County that you go up to ski and on the weekends, here’s what you need to do to pay attention there, because you’re at a higher elevation and in colder weather”. You have things that may be kind of tie into your business, or maybe it’s just like, “Hey, you know what? We travel around and do HVAC repair all over town, and Denver is really known for breweries and we love all the breweries. In fact, here’s our top five breweries”.
Greg Gifford:
So you mention HVAC repairs, because we drive around and do this, but here’s my five favorite breweries. And I like IPA’s, these are the five best IPA’s you can buy in Denver. So it’s kind of what we call the billboard effect. If everything on your site is all about what you do, you’re only going to show as a search result when somebody is looking to buy what you’re selling, which if we’re talking Denver, that’s a pretty narrow focus. No matter what the business is. Car dealer, doctor, lawyer, dentist, plumber, HVAC, you’re only putting stuff that’s going to show up as a search result when somebody’s looking for you.
Greg Gifford:
There’s a whole lot of other people out there that would potentially buy from you in the future. So it’s like putting a billboard up right there on 25, that somebody’s going to drive by every day on their way to work or on their way home. They get that brand recognition. So when they do want to buy from you, they’re more likely to buy. So it’s doing that stuff.
Greg Gifford:
Then on the link building side, instead of going for these high value, really big authoritative links, you actually want to get low value links according to the SEO tools, because what you want is links from other local businesses. So Google’s local algorithm really values it when you get a link from another business that’s in the same town as you.
Greg Gifford:
Even if that business has nothing to do with you, it still has something to do with you because it’s a local business. So it’s just a whole different way of thinking about digital marketing when you’re doing it.
John Doherty:
Another local business, they have Google My Business that like their website points to Google My Business and vice versa. And so Google can say like, “This business is also in Denver, there are plumber, and they’re linking to this HVAC company, right? I don’t know, maybe you’re partnered up or something like that, there multiple different reasons why? But they’re going to count that more than like a generic directory or general site in Dallas, like into a Denver HVAC, like pretend it’s just not going to carry as much weight.
Greg Gifford:
And it bleeds into ads too. Once you’ve got the website and the SEO side locked down, you ask what order we should go in. So first, it’s locked down your website, get good SEO. Then you’re going to want to start doing Google ads because that’s the next most important thing that’s going to give you the biggest bang for your buck. Then you’re going to want to add on Bing, because Bing, there’s still a lot of people that use Bing. People don’t realize all the places that Bing shows up. It’s the default browser on all Microsoft computers.
Greg Gifford:
So if somebody’s not going to go, “I really like Chrome. I want to switch to it,” which means, not to be ages, but typically older generation people are not super computer savvy or they don’t care. They’re going to use whatever browser comes on the computer, which means they’re seeing Bing, they’re not seeing Google or-
John Doherty:
And that’s big for those where they come to your home because people that are older are more likely to be homeowners and they’re more likely to use [crosstalk 00:29:28]-
Greg Gifford:
Exactly. For younger generation, it’s everybody that uses Cortana as their voice assistant. It’s going to be Bing results. Everybody that does searches on a windows phone, which there’s not that many or anybody that does searches on Xbox is also Bing. So there’s a lot of different places that’s Bing stuff and Microsoft Office. You can run ads inside of Microsoft office too, and that stuff shows up. So Bing is important. Then once you’ve locked down Google and Bing, that’s when you start adding in social.
Greg Gifford:
But with any of those paid ad platforms, it’s also about locality. One of the biggest mistakes we see when we’re talking to potential clients that we work with is, they’ll be running Google ads and they’re not constrained to their city. So, I might be talking to a business owner that’s in Seattle and we start doing some searches and we see that guy’s ads showing up to me in Dallas, where there’s no way that anybody in Dallas would ever buy that product or service. But that doesn’t mean Google’s not going to charge you for that click if somebody clicks on it.
John Doherty:
Exactly.
Greg Gifford:
So, you’ve got to make sure you’re with a vendor that understands local and doesn’t just go, “Let’s go spit this campaign out and not constrain it to a particular area.”
John Doherty:
Yep, totally, totally. So I want to do a couple of like rapid fire questions for you on local SEO. And then I want to talk about budgeting real quick.
Greg Gifford:
Yep.
John Doherty:
So first of all, some questions that I commonly get from location based businesses is when it comes to local SEO, does the phone number on your page matter? Like I’m in Denver, right? 720 and 303 are two area codes. If I have 215, which is my like personal right because I lived in Philly 10 years ago and I haven’t changed my phone number. If I have my 215 number on there, is that going to impact me negatively for local SEO?
Greg Gifford:
Some people will say yes. Some people will say no.
John Doherty:
What’s Greg’s take?
Greg Gifford:
My take is, nobody’s 100% for sure. But it’s pretty likely that, that at least has some amount of weight. Now, does it mean that if everything else has done well and you’ve got that Philly area code that you’re not going to show up in searches? No. But why not do everything that you can and having a local area code is a really easy thing to do. It’s not hard. It doesn’t take any knowledge or coding.
John Doherty:
Totally.
Greg Gifford:
Get a call forwarding number, get a call tracking number. You should be doing call tracking any way to track what’s going on. You don’t need an 800 number. Nobody needs toll free numbers. Everybody can call for free. So just get a local area code tracking number, and that way, if your cell phone does have a Philly area code, get your call tracking number, it still rings to your cell phone, but customers see that local area code on the site.
John Doherty:
Yeah, it’s a conversion thing too. Because like I’m in Denver.
Greg Gifford:
Exactly.
John Doherty:
I see an HVAC company with two and five, I’m like, “Oh, really?” That’s a Philly number. So yeah, it builds trust to improve your conversions.
Greg Gifford:
Yep.
John Doherty:
Number two, address. Same sort of thing.
Greg Gifford:
Address very important. Address is 100%. 100% for sure important. Your address is really important. It needs to be on your site. It actually needs to be marked up with schema markup. Very clearly you’re holding Google’s hand saying this is physically where I am because that location in the real world and proximity of how far away the searcher is to your location is so important in local.
John Doherty:
Totally. People historically, I’ve always heard people talking about your NAP, right? Name, address, phone number used to be the same across your site, your Google my business, your directory listings. It looks like patients like all that sort of stuff. Like same phone number, same address, same business name, all that kind of thing that needs to be consistent across the board because that’s what Google scrapes to show you other places as well. So, we’re going to make sure you’re giving them the right information.
John Doherty:
Quickly on blog content, this is something I get asked about a lot, like, “Should like local businesses be creating content? It sounds like you say yes. Right? So like a real estate agent. Like if I create, from your perspective, if I create, like I’m a real estate agent, let’s say in Denver and I create content around like how to buy a house, right? That’ll probably show up nationwide.
Greg Gifford:
Potentially yeah.
John Doherty:
Is it worthwhile doing it, or like, I mean, really what you should do is how to buy a house in Northwest Denver, Colorado. How to buy a house in Denver, Colorado. So it’s less likely to show up broader. But if someone searches how to buy a house, they’re located in Denver, they’re more likely to show Denver-
Greg Gifford:
We could have done a whole hour just talking about this particular topic and what’s around the fire. But that’s the thing, if you’re writing a piece of content around a concept, because you want to show up for that, and you’re also making that the best answer to the question that searches you’re asking about that concept, it’s likely you are going to show up outside of your local area. And we have a car dealership that’s got one blog post that gets 30,000 plus visits a month just to this blog post.
John Doherty:
Wow.
Greg Gifford:
And then we get a lot of international visitors to our blog because of this post. Should we take it down? We said, “Well, yeah, if there’s 30,000 visits a month and 25,000 of them are outside of your local area, who cares?” That’s still 5,000 people in your local area that that’s valuable for. And maybe that post doesn’t drive business, but the blog, it’s really important to understand the content that goes on your site. And the content that goes into your blog is two different kinds of content.
Greg Gifford:
The content from the main section of your site, that’s your product service content bye for me now. The content on your blog is more informational. It’s more showing that you are an expert and you’re the right person to talk to. The content on your blog usually doesn’t lead to someone calling you or someone filling out a form. It’s usually how they discover you. And then they see other stuff on your site and they convert from one of those website pages.
John Doherty:
Right. Plus if you’re doing any sort of like social ads, retargeting, that sort of thing, you dropped your pixel on anyone that comes, but you only show your ads to people that are within the Dallas area. And so you’re not actually paying, you’re not actually advertising to them. So, you are getting, and you’re getting 5,000 more qualified people a month, right?
Greg Gifford:
Yep.
John Doherty:
And if it’s a house purchase or a car purchase or something like that, we’re talking big ticket items here, right? Even HVAC like five, six K, still a big ticket item. It’s not nothing for sure. So let’s talk quickly on that note about like kind of high ticket items, high ticket services, whether it’s a car or HVAC or plastic surgery, how do you counsel people to think about the budget that they put towards this?
Greg Gifford:
So when we were talking before we started recording, you worded it way more eloquently than I would. But basically what you want to look at is, you want to grow your business. And if you incrementally sell one or two more of your product or service, what is that worth to you, and what are you willing to spend to get enough leads? Because it’s not like a one-to-one relationship. Somebody comes to your site and submits a lead doesn’t necessarily mean they’re going to buy from you.
Greg Gifford:
So, if you’ve got a 25% close rate on phone calls, so 25% of the people that call you are going to actually buy from you. That means to sell one more, you need four phone calls.
John Doherty:
Yep.
Greg Gifford:
But usually selling one more is not enough. So if you need to sell four more, then you need 16 phone calls out of that. So what’s that going to take? And what’s that going to cost? And then you’ve got to look at what are you getting for SEO? And you guys just did that study on what do people charge? What’s the average hourly rate? I think it was like $125 an hour, was the industry average?
John Doherty:
Historically it’s 125. They’ll have the new one out in about a month. But yeah, historically it’s 125. It’s why [crosstalk 00:36:59] don’t have it.
Greg Gifford:
So let’s say, if it’s 125 on average, and you’re spending just $500 on SEO. That means at best, you’re getting four hours of work a month to do all of the technical stuff. Research, the content, write the content, edit the content, post the content, optimize the content, do your reputation stuff. Do your name, address, phone number stuff. Do your link building, like there’s not enough time there.
John Doherty:
It could kind of work.
Greg Gifford:
So typically, and I speak at conferences all over the world. Are there some businesses they can spend 500 bucks a month on SEO and be fine? Sure. If you’re a mom-and-pop business in the middle of Wyoming and there’s not much competition, great. If you’re an HVAC repair in Dallas where there’s probably 800 people in the Metro area that will do HVAC repair, you’re not going to get by on 500 bucks a month. It’s not going to work. So what I tell people at most conferences all over the world is, if you’re looking at it in US dollars, almost think of it like an attorney.
Greg Gifford:
It’s not like every time you talk to your digital marketing partner, you’re going to pay more money. But look at it like you’re buying a bucket of hours. When you’re buying SEO, or paying for PPC management or social ad management, you’re paying for a butt or multiple butts to sit in a seat and manually do that work. You’re paying for manual labor and expertise. So, there’s time involved to do all of these things.
Greg Gifford:
You got to think about what’s that going to cost. And typically, you shouldn’t really be spending less than 2,500 to three grand a month on the really low end. Then it go way up from there. But if you’re going, wow, 1000 bucks a month is too expensive for SEO. Yet, you want to do five or six more HVAC installs, the math doesn’t work there. You’re not going to get enough return out of that $1000 because there’s too much competition.
John Doherty:
Right. Exactly. Yeah. And I actually say, and this has been a big thing that I’ve been pushing is, the question of how much should we spend is exactly the wrong question. The question you should be asking is, what results do we want to get-
Greg Gifford:
Exactly.
John Doherty:
… and then what spin is it going to take to get there. Right? So it’s setting your own expectations and too many business owners, or even directors of marketing, Greg, too many people are like, “Well, we don’t know, we don’t know what we want to get.” Okay. Well, let’s solve that first. Right? Let’s look at how many leads are you getting now?
Greg Gifford:
Yep.
John Doherty:
How many are you closing? What’s your average close rate. Right? And it literally becomes math, and then, okay. If you haven’t done it before, they’re doing the research or paying someone like y’all to do the research for, “Okay, what’s it probably going to cost, right?” So you can look at your website, conversion data. If we get 100 visitors, we get one form submit, we know we’re going to close one of those. Right? And it’s let’s say $5,000.
John Doherty:
So every form submit is worth $1250 to you. Great, good to know. Right? Like we’ve got another data point, 100 visitors, $1250. Okay, cool. How much are you willing to pay to make $1,250, right. We’re going to pay 10% of that. 125. So you got to get clicks for like a dollar 10 or something like that. Right? Is that going to work?
Greg Gifford:
Which doesn’t always work out because like-
John Doherty:
Which doesn’t always work out.
Greg Gifford:
Like HVAC clicks in Dallas are 400 bucks a click.
John Doherty:
400 bucks a click. Holy crap. Right?
Greg Gifford:
Yeah.
John Doherty:
See. So like Google ads might not work until you’re at a certain scale. Right? And you’re doing big volume there. Or you improve your conversion rates. You need to get five or 10 form submits off of every 100 visitors in order to make those economic sport.
Greg Gifford:
And leading down that same path of a lot of times, businesses don’t know what they should spend. Those same people make the same mistake of going. “I see a lot of people out there sell SEO for 1000 bucks, so I want to get SEO for 1000 bucks.” Or they’ll talk to an agency, it says, “Here’s our four packages. Package one, package two, package three, package four, here’s the cost associated,” and let the business pick which one they need. That doesn’t work because how’s the business know which one they need?
John Doherty:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yep.
Greg Gifford:
A good agency is going to talk to you about what your goals are, and it’s not just how many leads do you need? It’s what kinds of leads do you need? You know, as an HVAC guy, do you want repair leads or do you want installation leads? And what’s more valuable and how do we split that up? And what are you getting right now? Let’s look at your Google analytics to see what’s going on.
Greg Gifford:
And then we can really answer, here’s how much you should probably spend on paid search, because we can see what your competitors are pretty close to spending, and we can see what your goals are. And we can back into those numbers instead of just coming and going, “Okay, we’ve talked to people all the time and like, yeah, we’re currently spending 20 grand a month on paid search.”
Greg Gifford:
And we come in and we do an analysis and we’re like, “Your paid search company isn’t constraining it to your area. You’re wasting $5,000 a month on clicks that are outside of the state. That there’s no possible way that, that person’s going to buy from you. So let’s not spend 20 grand, let’s spend 15 grand. In fact, you know what? We can do for 12 grand and get you twice as many leads as what you’re getting now, because we’re doing it the right way, aligned with your goals instead of just clicking a button to generate the same crap we do for everybody.
John Doherty:
And you just saved them 100 grand a year.
Greg Gifford:
Yeah.
John Doherty:
I mean, if you cut out eight grand times 12, $96,000 a year. Like that’s huge. No, I think that’s very wise when it comes to like thinking about how you go about kind of buying services as well. And I do actually think that agencies should present multiple options, but not like, “Here are your options. Tell us which one you want.” Right?
John Doherty:
Not like a menu maybe earlier in the process, an agency will present a menu, just like here are all the services that we offer, if someone is a little bit kind of higher in the funnel, we’re not quite sure what they need. And sometimes people like to know that like, “Hey, we’re not interested in Google ads yet, but we do want to do it in the future. So it’s good to know that we can bring you that in the future.”
John Doherty:
I see that helping a lot of agencies close work and it just helps buyers feel a bit better about signing with an agency, even if they never end up doing it, they’re more likely to sign. But, really what it comes down to is, “Does the agency have they experience overall,” but the agency should also tell you, “Hey, here are the four different options. Here are the trade-offs for each one, right?”
Greg Gifford:
Exactly.
John Doherty:
You say that you literally only have $2,000 a month. That is your hard budget. I get it. Right? You told us your goals are this though. So on $2,000 a month, we’re going to do X, Y, and Z. And I think we can get you to this goal, this revised, reset expectation number here, right?
Greg Gifford:
Yeah.
John Doherty:
But if we can hit this, then you’re making an extra $5,000 a month-
Greg Gifford:
And then its easy to upgrade.
John Doherty:
… would you then be willing to put an extra $1000 to $5,000 a month in, and here’s how the timeline will expedite. Right?
Greg Gifford:
Exactly.
John Doherty:
A good agency should be able to tell you that as well, as opposed to like, “Here’s the number, take it or leave it.”
Greg Gifford:
Yep.
John Doherty:
And this is actually something I’ve really changed my perspective on Greg. Because when I used to sell a lot of SEO consulting work, I would basically just be like… Because I would do a lot of like getting to know them and kind of putting together the right pitch. And by the time I went into presenting them a number, they were just like, “Yep, this is the thing that we’re doing. And we agreed on the scope.”
John Doherty:
But I’ve actually been convinced over the last couple of years that presenting three different like engagement levels and then setting those expectations for like, this is what is going to get you. My coach, Chris Lama talks about like, here’s number one. It’s like 80% of what you need, because that’s what you can afford. Right?
Greg Gifford:
Yep.
John Doherty:
Here’s 120% of what you need because you get all the things that you want and need, but then there’s this other 20% that you don’t even know that you need that we know because we are the experts. So it’s going to cost 20% more than what you said you’re ideally going to spend. Do you have that budget, right? And [crosstalk 00:44:16]-
Greg Gifford:
But you can’t get there unless you have the discovery call in the first place to find out what they actually are looking for. Just because they say they need digital marketing, doesn’t mean you could come in and go, “Okay, here’s your three options.” You got to talk to them about what they want to do, what they need, what their goals are, et cetera, first.
John Doherty:
So as the buyer, when you’re talking to agencies like SearchLab or coming through Credo and getting introduced to agencies like SearchLab, asking those questions and they should be asking you those-
