Episode 508. Bill Rossell shares tons of the low-hanging fruit that we are often overlooking when it comes to our digital marketing package! https://Siteliner.com visit this site to scan yours Reach out to Bill Rossell at BRossell@1seo.com
Show Notes
Tersh talks with Bill Rossell from 1SEO.com
Bill is the Vice President of Client Relations at 1SEO.com, Bill leads the Client Relations Managers, who provide direct communication with the clients of 1SEO Digital Agency. They ensure clients see an ROI from their online marketing that is provided by 1SEO.com.
Bill previously led numerous Sales and Marketing teams as the Regional Vice President of Sales with YP.com and the Director of Online Marketing for North America with 1&1 Internet. He has a passion for leading people and helping them to develop both personally and professionally.
In today’s episode, Tersh and Bill talk about 8 industry secrets related to your digital marketing campaigns as an owner of a home service business. Bill Rossell shares tons of the low hanging fruit that we are often overlooking when it comes to our digital marketing package!
Our Deep Dive~
- SOP (Standard Operating Procedures)…You read that correctly…we talk SOP’s on a digital marketing show!
- Market Spend…how do we figure out this number?
- LOOK AT LSA! Who is there with you?
- Ads in the map pack…do you have them there?
- You MUST be retargeting!
- Create local pages
- …you’ll have to listen to the rest of the episode for these juicy details!
60% of your clients still look in the organic section!!!
RESOURCES
- https://Siteliner.com Bill talks about visiting this site to scan your site to show you errors and if you have any content that is copied from your other pages!
- Reach out to Bill Rossell via email at BRossell@1seo.com
- Learn more about Tersh by visiting https://serviceemperor.com
- Have you ever wondered HOW to target your perfect client?!? It’s EMOTION…EMOTION is what sells, and this link is how you learn your client’s emotion for free… visit https://admanity.com/servicebusinessmastery/ to get this free share that I (Tersh) stand behind 100%!
“If you know how people will emotionally react, you have an advantage more valuable than all of humanity’s innovations.”
Thank you for listening to another episode of the Service Business Mastery Podcast!
Learn more about Tersh at https://serviceemperor.com
Check out the video recording of our show here.
Transcription
Tersh Blissett: [00:00:01] Hello, everyone, out there in the podcast world. Hope you have a great day. You’re listening to or watching this episode of the Service Business Mastery Podcast. I’m your host, Tersh Blissett. Today we have 1CEO on the show and I’m talking with Bill Russell and we are talking digital marketing. I mean, we can talk a lot of stuff. We don’t have a true outline.
Tersh Blissett: [00:00:24] I mean, when it comes to digital marketing or just marketing in general, there’s lots of rabbit holes we could jump into and deep dive I’ll do my very absolute best to keep this episode at 20 or 30 minutes because then I could talk for days when it comes to digital marketing or marketing in general. But with that being said, welcome to the show, Bill.
Bill Russell: [00:00:45] Hey, thanks. It’s been we obviously have been kind of just cueing things up and a preshow. And it’s been a phenomenal conversation up to this point. And I assume that we’re going to have some more great conversations as we go through the podcast. And hopefully, I can give some wisdom and knowledge to your listeners as far as, you know, any questions you might have about what we do and how we try to help all kinds of businesses grow and hit their revenue goals?
Tersh Blissett: [00:01:11] Absolutely. So tell us a little bit about you and your company and what you have going on there and kind of the history and what makes you an expert.
Bill Russell: [00:01:23] Well, what makes me an expert, I don’t know if I claim that one, but, you know, I’ve been with one CEO for the last six years we’re a full-service digital agency based out of Philadelphia Company has been around for 12 years, started by a brother and sister, had great growth over the course of the last 12 years. Google premier partner. We work with a lot of organizations like CEO Warrior, you know, Nexstar, and other companies out there. But we’re not just a service-based business, you know, a digital marketing agency. We do become lawyers, doctors, dentists, chiropractors, plastics, you know, any type of business. It’s looking for lead growth. We kind of a fundamental philosophy that you can’t be B2B, can’t be B2C. You kind of have to be to a business, to everything today in order to support where you’re going and what you’re doing. So me, I’m originally from Pittsburgh, spent six years in the United States Navy onboard nuclear-powered submarines, went back to school North-Eastern up in Boston, spent some time in the restaurant business. And then I decided I wanted to get out of that, started selling print Yellow Pages, went to Internet, Yellow Pages.
Bill Russell: [00:02:34] And believe it or not, at one time, YellowPages.com had more local customers and Google did if you can believe that, in 2005. Wow. So, you know, and then transitioned into the Internet world and kind of haven’t looked back.
Tersh Blissett: [00:02:48] So what would you say? First off, thank you for your service in the Navy. That’s that. Appreciate you as well. Man, in a submarine. Who? Not me. I can’t drink all that water.
Bill Russell: [00:03:01] Well, you know, that’s where, you know, spending the longest stretch I had was 84 days underwater. And, you know, it’s definitely an environment that takes you to be a little bit crazy, kind of like working in digital marketing. But, you know, it’s something that, you know, I cherish the lifelong friends that I’ve gained from that. And more importantly, the life skills that you learn in the military are aspects that can help you, as you well know, throughout the course of your life, because you become disciplined.
Bill Russell: [00:03:33] And what the military teaches you, that there is a system to every single aspect in military life. And those businesses that you see successful develop systems along the way that are going to help any business to be from turning the lights on. When you walk in, to making the pot of coffee, there’s a system to it. It’s going to be it’s going to be successful. And what people are doing.
Tersh Blissett: [00:03:59] Yeah, I mean, you have SOP’s for everything that you do. And it’s it is mind-blowing, especially for someone who is, your full time in the military. I mean, maybe you’ve spent 20 years in the military and we have this because we’re in Savannah. We have Fort Stewart, Hudner, we have one sixty fifth the Airlift Wing, we have Navy. Yeah, we have Kings Bay. I mean, you have Coast Guards. We have everything here. We have Parris Island. I mean, we have all the branches are right here. And so we have career military members that are getting out and then coming to civilian world. And they’re like, wait a minute, what’s S.O.P on?
Tersh Blissett: [00:04:41] This was what do we do here? I’m like, man, just wing it, you know, and just like that.
Tersh Blissett: [00:04:48] And they’re like, no, that’s not how we do things. And it’s like, welcome to civilian world, you know? And it sucks. But it’s so much of it, as a small business owner, we’re I mean, we’re talking digital marketing, so let’s not dive in the rabbit hole here of process and procedure.
Tersh Blissett: [00:05:05] But this so crazy of how much a small business owner like we got out of a truck and we were like telling the next guy, we’ll just do it this way. This is how we’ve always done it. Or that’s what you hear. It’s how you always and where’s that written down? Like what’s the actual process and what the process is in my head, I don’t have it written down. So there’s not really a standard operating procedure on this. It is just how we’ve always done it. And, you know, obviously, you can’t do that. You have to write down the procedures, record the procedures. What we do. I mean, we’re digital, we’re a remote company. And very much we rely on digital. Just information management, so we have a full information management system on our website, and so the backend is accessible by our employees. So whenever we have something come across, it’s like recorded a short video of it and we’ll upload the video and then that becomes the process and then everybody has questions about it.
Bill Russell: [00:06:17] It’s easy for them to access that no, no different than us here on Tessio. You know, we had to and congratulations on being remote before it was time to be remote. Most businesses aren’t that lucky. But for us, we made an incredible shift to going to a 100 percent remote environment back in March of last year, not by any choice that we wanted to, but by the choice of what we had to do. And what it did was influenced and influenced our overall teams, whether it be search engine optimization, paper, click management sales. Every team was able to become more efficient and effective because we could use the Zoom’s to our advantage to be able to say, let’s watch the game film. What did we do? Well, you know, for years, every coach in every major sport uses film as a method to make the team better. We took that same approach and said, all right, here’s what we’re going to do on a weekly basis. We’re going to dissect each one of our teams, whether it be, you know, the client relations team or the team or the team or social media team, how we’re having that communication and transparency with our clients to be able to say how do we make ourself better? And so it almost became a standard operating procedure in itself to utilize zoom in video to better help us with our clients and being able to say this is where we can look to say we did this great, but we could improve on this. And so most businesses are really taking advantage of the ability to utilize Zoom as far as that recording featuring, for lack of better words, watch the game film.
Tersh Blissett: [00:07:59] I love that you said that. Do you ever get into the situation or have you seen anybody? It’s a situation where it’s like, oh, it’s too much content like it’s too much film to watch.
Tersh Blissett: [00:08:11] I could do the analysis paralysis type stuff going on.
Bill Russell: [00:08:15] Definitely. You have to be able to look at the parts of the game film where, OK, let’s skip over the good stuff, let’s skip over that. Let’s take a look and dissect where did we where do we overall go better? And so, yes, there is that paralysis by analysis as far as having so much content. I mean, you think about it, your average client calls running an hour, maybe an hour and fifteen minutes. On the sales side, we might be in a call with a client for an hour, hour, and fifteen minutes, just talking about all the different marketing that that particular client has from digital traditional where they’re taking it. And so what’s working well for them? How is it on the service? How is it working with their house call pro or their service tight? And where are they seeing the pros and cons of doing this particular form of marketing versus another? You know, John Wanamaker said it best. Half of all advertising works. It’s about figuring out which half works and which half doesn’t. And let’s put more money into the half that works than it does.
Tersh Blissett: [00:09:14] That’s the million-dollar question there.
Bill Russell: [00:09:16] You know, it’s you know that answer. Yeah, as soon as you know what’s working well, you stick with the game plan. It’s not like let’s change the offense just to say let’s change it, you know, especially in today’s world.
Tersh Blissett: [00:09:30] Yeah. I mean, very, very true so that kind of leads into one of my questions for you. And that is, let’s say we’re a sub-one million dollar company and we don’t have a massive budget because we’re bootstrapping everything. And maybe it’s our first or second year in business. Where do I spend my marketing dollars and what percentage do you think that we need to be as far as being a market spend versus our total revenue?
Bill Russell: [00:10:00] Boy, you just hit me with the direct question, which I can appreciate now, one of the things that I will tell you is that you can be successful on any budget, OK? You can be successful in any budget, but it’s not a matter of where the revenue currently is from our vantage point. It’s about where the revenue is going and where you want to go. So if you’re doing five hundred thousand and you want to do eight fifty-nine hundred or you want to crack that million mark, look at either one or two things in our opinion. Number one is to look at the incremental growth that you’re trying to because you have to look at how much client revenue is coming through on your maintenance plans or specifically your existing customer base.
Bill Russell: [00:10:43] So do you want to look and say, OK, if I’m going for five hundred to a million, is that five hundred thousand dollar gap that I want to look at, or do I want to look at the overall revenue? If I’m looking at an aggressive growth plan, I think that’s where you have to be more aggressive in your marketing allocation.
Bill Russell: [00:10:59] The Small Business Administration says that a business under five million should allocate seven to eight percent of that marketing allocation. Now, how that’s broken down digital, traditional, or non-digital, you can look at that overall. But I would take a look at where my total revenue goals are. Look, anywhere from how aggressive that number is and growth and then specifically say anywhere between six and eight percent of that as a marketing allocation. Here’s the caveat on the second part of that question is, what am I looking to do if I’m a service based business is I’m looking at local service ads. OK, you know, I think that first and foremost, you’re going to see your greatest return. But also look at in your market how many people when you go to the local service ads and it’ll say more HVAC providers, look at how many people are competing in your marketplace. I just happened to look the other day in another market in Phenix. There’s one hundred and twenty-five, HVAC companies competing for the local service ads in the Phenix market. So you’re ultimately going to have to say the chances of you getting that budget allocation because there’s only so many searches are going to be small.
Bill Russell: [00:12:12] I looked in another market. There were eighty-five more and more people have gotten in the local service ads. So now you have to look and say, do I have the budget to compete as far as where my market is compared to where the market is going? So I think that every business is a little bit different. But if I’m sitting in the business doing eight fifty, I’m looking at local services first. And if I couldn’t compete in that market, I’m going to start to say I’m going to look at putting ads in the map pack the geographic region that I can, because it’s a lower cost per click that I might be running as far as straight PPC aspects from an HVAC standpoint. And then I’m always going to work on where my long term organic strategy is because 60 percent of all people are still looking towards organic versus looking on the page side of the equation. There’s just so much trust in what people see from an organic standpoint.
Tersh Blissett: [00:13:06] Sweet, um. There are so many questions that just arose from you talking… The five to eight percent, are you saying if our budget if our target is is a million dollars, are we taking eight percent of a million, or are we taking eight percent of $800,000?
Bill Russell: [00:13:30] So there are two points, number one is you can look and say, I’m going to take the eight percent of the million dollars, OK, so you should have an overall marketing budget of eighty thousand on a million dollars throughout the course of the year. That’s for Wrap’s stickers, LSA, PPC, SEO, direct mailers, door hangers, whatever that method that might be that flows into that marketing, you should be looking at 80 grand all total of where you’re going. Another way to look at it and say, OK, well, if I want to go from eighty thousand or excuse me eight hundred thousand to a million, I might want to look at twenty to twenty-two percent of my incremental revenue growth. As far as getting there, you’re going to get one way or the other, you’re going to come within five to six thousand bucks of where it might be.
Bill Russell: [00:14:18] If you go 20 percent on that market, you’re looking at a forty thousand dollar budget. It would give you a four to one return. At the end of the day, it really comes down to where you’re comfortable with as far as setting your budget allocations for growth.
Tersh Blissett: [00:14:31] Ok, so you are a digital marketing agency, a full, full working agency. Yeah. So this may be a hard question to answer. Do we do digital marketing before we do a vehicle wrap or and then yard signs and door hangers and postcards? Like how do we justify spending on one versus the other?
Bill Russell: [00:15:02] Yeah, I think that that’s where I kind of go back a little old school, you know, and there are those forms of DirecTV advertising versus branding, you know, to build the brand. It you know, it’s like the chicken or the egg. What comes first, you know, does it come that I want people to know who I am or does it come for people? I want them to find me when they don’t know who I am. You know, obviously, there’s the power of your truck sitting in my driveway or that yard sign, OK?
Bill Russell: [00:15:32] But that’s only being seen by a limited amount of people. If I can directly target to specifically who I want to target, it’s then a different situation. So we’ve had some great success with not only looking at LSH, CSIRO, but we’ve had great success in looking at lead generation through social media and being able to say, hey, how can you target specific end users utilizing your existing client base to be able to bring back that in their feed? Those people that are like-minded individuals, you and I both belong to the same local football club. We both share that on social media. You’re a client of mine. I upload that into the back end of my Facebook ads manager. Now I’m getting feedback for your company in my feed because you and I are those same type of people and Facebook knows that. And they’re going to share that information. It’s going to be a way that you can generate an additional lead generation at a lower cost than you. What that sixty, seventy, eighty dollars per click that you might pay for furnace repair in Savannah. So there’s different ways to look at it.
Bill Russell: [00:16:46] I think it all comes down to what your return on ad spend that I spend X, did I get Y and if you got Y and Y is more than the other campaign, let’s put more into Y.
Tersh Blissett: [00:16:59] Is there a point of spending too much money? Like is there a point where it’s like, all right, diminishing returns? Like we’re just like we’re spending more money but our percentage isn’t the same amount.
Bill Russell: [00:17:13] It depends if you ask Google, they’ll say no, if you ask an agency, there is going to be some point, there’s going to be a diminishing return, because at the end of the day, you’re going to look at where your three-day job boards are and say, hey, where am I? Can I actually take on the work that I’m spending to get calls? And so I think that’s where you have to have good communication with your agency to be able to understand what’s transpiring between you and the agency to help direct that particular campaign success. Because if your guys are completely booked out and I’m driving cause that’s wasted money and we never want to waste any client’s money, we want to make that money work as efficiently and effectively as possible for you.
Tersh Blissett: [00:17:59] So what happens the first let’s call it three weeks of the summer, like here, we don’t have a winner. Let’s just be honest. It’s not that we don’t get winter here, but the first couple of weeks of summer, we get hit hard with the no-cool calls and we got to turn off or cut it back. Does that create a huge negative look in Google or anybody’s eyes, like when we’re going to turn it back on, you’re like, oh crap, the faucet turned back off, let’s turn it back on, you know?
Bill Russell: [00:18:36] Yeah, that’s a great question. That’s a great question. So one of the factors that’s really important to understand is the quality score that goes into any one of your ad campaigns. Google is like any other business. You don’t want to have your call volume ratcheting up, ratcheting down. You want to have a consistent call volume. Google’s the same way they want to know that that money is going to be there consistently over a period of time. So what happens is you’ll see companies will ratchet campaigns up, they’ll ratchet them down. But what that does is affects the overall quality score of that paid campaign. I’d rather bring it down slowly by having good communication of what’s transpiring, then ratcheted up, ratchet it down because what happens is the quality score for the layman is like a credit score.
Bill Russell: [00:19:23] Ok, if I walk into a bank, right. With an eight o five, they’re going to say Mr. So here you go. Here’s 30 year fixed, two-point nine nine. Have a great day. If I walk in with the five o five, they’re going to say, you better get that 20 percent down, you better call Tersh and then you better have that good cosigner come in and now you’re going to pay nine percent on that particular. Google’s the same way if you have a quality score on those ad campaigns coming back at a two or three, you might end up paying more than that actual bid price on that particular cost per click because Google’s saying that the quality score of these campaigns is not as good as you want them to be, are they want them to be. And so ultimately, take a look at what’s happening from a standpoint and say let’s slowly lower it down and let’s slowly lower back up before just going.
Bill Russell: [00:20:11] I’m going to set up a three hundred dollar a day budget and then I’m going to push you down into a one hundred and ten dollar a day budget, try to keep it more consistent and ratcheting it up, ratcheting down and always protect your brand as it applies to PPC campaigns where you never turn that off.
Tersh Blissett: [00:20:28] Hmm. OK, yeah. Go into detail with that, I mean, I want to ask another question, but you just drop a little golden nugget there.
Bill Russell: [00:20:38] So so explain what you mean by that. Yeah. A lot of times what will happen is that, you know, whether it be 1SEO that somebody doing a search for OK, competitors will bid on your brand all the time. OK, so. Incrementally, what you can see is when you rank wealth for most businesses. Ninety-nine percent of them, unless their website is completely hosed, when you put in the term one, you’re going to come back relevant for you always want to keep your brand protected by having a paid ad there.
Bill Russell: [00:21:19] Your cost on that ad is going to be pennies on the dollar versus allowing somebody else to come in and bid on your brand. And I see larger companies bidding on brands of smaller competitors all the time. And so what will happen is you’ll look for an HVAC company here in Philadelphia and you’ll see Horizon Services bidding on that brand. Well, that’s great. That’s protecting that. Or it’s somebody else out there, wherever it might be across the country. But it’s you know, it’s always about saying, hey, I want to make sure that my brand and my name, because I did that vehicle wrap, because I did that postcard that if somebody’s searching for me, OK, because I have a referral word of mouth, social media. Somebody told you you always want to make sure that you’re represented in that search for the brand.
Tersh Blissett: [00:22:10] Yeah. And that’s a really good point. I had when I first really was getting to the business owners stage, I was so frustrated with the agency I was using because the majority of my PPC ad spend was on my own brand name. And I was like, I don’t understand why I do this, you know? And it was so frustrating to me. But also our website sucked. So our cost per click was high, you know, which that kind of leads me to the question I want to ask before your brand. The score is not just how fast and you move the needle up and down. It’s also that the page like relevancy to the keyword, search your landing page versus sending them to your home page type stuff. Right.
Bill Russell: [00:23:01] You couldn’t hit it, hit it better, and you’re going to see a tremendous amount of change about the end-user experience.
Bill Russell: [00:23:10] Ok, we’re a little bit different in an agency. A lot of agencies will say, let me write out customized landing pages across the board. No index that, you know, we want to drive the traffic into the page. That’s most relevant. So, you know, obviously, for https://ServiceEmperor.com, and when you’re looking for specific heating, you don’t have any heat in Savannah but AC or AC repair in your marketplace. I want to land them on that AC repair page where you talked about what makes that page experience, how long they’re spending on that particular page. Did they bounce? Did they move to another page or those pages interlinking between one another? How you set up that experience from where the ad goes to where it lands is also going to be a major factor in helping with that quality score. I mean, there’s it’s Google. Just when we think we figure everything out, they change the question. And that’s where you have to understand that the fundamental philosophies that exist are providing a great end-user experience and being able to say, how am I talking to you?
Bill Russell: [00:24:13] You have two people that you have to facilitate. Number one, you have to facilitate the person that’s looking for you. And number two is you have to facilitate Google. And I have clients come to me and they’ll be like, yeah, well, we rebuild our site five years ago and I don’t think any changes. OK, well, what somebody wanted five years ago and what somebody wants now, they’re two completely different. The end user’s journey is there’s so much noise in the world today. You know, it’s the fantasy marketing dream is to say, oh, I need something, I went to Service Emperor. I found it and I’m calling. Yeah, that doesn’t even include when my wife says, take out the garbage. I left that particular situation. Now I lost track because my phone went off. Now it’s a situation where I’m getting hit with a retargeting ad from you, and now the journey is a completely different journey than it’s ever been before. So you have to look at those different touchpoints that that end-user could potentially see and catch you or somebody else is going to take that business from.
Tersh Blissett: [00:25:20] That’s a that’s tons of tons of great points there. I mean, jeez, more questions at the retargeting. So people may be listening and they are like, what the hell is retargeting? Explain retargeting really fast. And I have a question about it that everybody always asks.
Bill Russell: [00:25:43] Well, you know, retargeting is very, very simple. There’s a code that’s placed on your website when you come to that website. Now, that particular end-user is going to be followed along based on the cookie being dropped onto that particular site. So whether it be within the Google display network, whether it be within Facebook, Instagram, you’re going to be able to say, I’m going to hit that person with an ad because they came to my site. It’s that simple. And it will I will tell you if there’s nothing else out of that as driving traffic from an LSA standpoint, you absolutely as a service-based business need and I’ll repeat that one more time, absolutely needs to have retargeting campaigns set up to keep the journey alive for the people who found you.
Tersh Blissett: [00:26:34] So with retargeting itself, it seems like a very, very complicated process. If you don’t have a digital marketing agency. Is that an accurate statement to say? Not to ask the digital marketing agency if we need a digital marketing agency.
Bill Russell: [00:26:52] My answer to that, my answer to is you’re better off using an agency to help you setting up the right campaigns because then you can start to do additional things like I want to dynamically hit and ads for somebody that landed on an AC repair page with an AC repair and somebody that landed on a furnace installation page. I want to hit them with a furnace installation at it. I think that the easiest way to explain that to people is as far as retargeting, you want out to buy a new set of golf shoes and then all of a sudden you’re seeing golf shoes, ads, not only for the brand that you wanted but the brands that are similar are going to build out additional campaigns. All a sudden you’re seeing seven ads in your feed that show golf shoes from Callaway, from Nike, front foot joy. You’re seeing all those ads, the same way that if I come to Service Emperor, it’s a situation that I’m now being hit with all these other agencies that are trying to capture that data that you already have and put noise into that person’s feet.
Tersh Blissett: [00:27:58] All right. So on the retargeting, how in-depth is retargeting like if I say something, is Siri listening to me and then I’m getting ads from Siri.
Bill Russell: [00:28:12] Well, it’s never been publicly said, but I can attest to this, when I was in Vegas for an… I was in for the service roundtable event in Vegas, and I have never in my life been to the Cartier jeweler, OK? And I happened to be walking in the Paris hotel and there was a Cartier jeweler. I said to myself, man, I wonder what it’s like to go into the Cartier jewelry. Somehow I started getting ads for Cartier jewelers. Now, it’s not a proven fact, but it’s kind of proven that it’s a soft test. That’s a soft test of what’s out there. The big thing with voice and let me just caveat that for the second, and this is why you haven’t seen voice take off to the level that it has the capability is because the majors in Apple, Amazon, Google has not been able to figure out how to monetize it, because if you say attract repair companies Savannah or you say furnace repair Savannah or you say AC repair Savanah, it can only give you one response. Yeah. Right, and because it can only give you one response, it can’t be monetized to the way that local service ads are, PPC ads are Facebook ads are. So until they truly figure out the way to monetize that, that that local search, from a voice standpoint, you’re going to probably still see it at bay, in my opinion.
Tersh Blissett: [00:29:46] I wonder. So this is just me being inquisitive because I transcribe every one of these episodes. I transcribe pretty much everything that I do. At what point does it become the real conversation? Because we all know that, you know, Panda came in effect and then, you know, all the different platforms and they would change things and move more towards real conversations and away from keyword stuffing type stuff. At what point does it because. Unless you’re in the HVAC industry, you don’t say, you know what I mean like it’s not.
Bill Russell: [00:30:20] I said that all the time. And when I see clients that set up their websites, I just had this conversation with a warrior the other day.bYou’ve put the term, hvac is a term that you and I both use because you’re in it. I don’t see a lady doing a query. And in the keyword research, say HVAC companies near me, she says furnace repair companies near me, she says air conditioning repair companies near me. He says boiler repair near me or boiler repair savannah.
Bill Russell: [00:30:52] So I think that the point is the content, OK, and what you’re saying to that end-user, and here’s a golden nugget to evaluate. Look at your local look at your pages on your Web site for those different, you know, different topics, AC repair, AC installation, look at those pages and see what the word and the content are on it. Generally, on a localized search, you should be thinking that there are anywhere from four hundred to six hundred words of content that those major terms that that page should be relevant for. You don’t want to overwhelm it by, like you said, keyword stuffing and saying AC repair and Savannah, get your best AC repair and Savannah having more AC repair and Savannah. And that makes a keyword density, meaning the total number of keywords divided by the total page content. You put yourself in this position where it’s like 30 percent and you’re saying watch your relevancy in your rankings, go like this.
Tersh Blissett: [00:31:55] So 400 to 600 good. We don’t need to be two thousand to three thousand.
Bill Russell: [00:32:01] Now, not on a localized search, if you are a national company like train or bring in a trying to get more traffic to your from a manufacturing standpoint, I would say, yeah, you want to be anywhere between 12 to 14 other words. Now, there are good long-form blog content that you might be looking to gain a rich snippet for like where somebody might say, why does my furnace smell when turning on common warm milk? And because everybody flips the switch in the middle of November, that first freeze, and it smells like there’s something burning or there’s a dead cat in your house. So, you know, hopefully, the furnace, which I’m sure there probably have been raccoons or whatever it might have been. But the fact of the matter is that you want to be in a situation where you’re looking at an overall strategy to prove that I’m talking about the page that exists on the site, putting that additional content out. Thousand words. If you got a great topic that you want to really put out some good content. The thing that I suggest to people is when they’re putting content out in the form of blogs nugget here, make sure you’re internally linking it to the page you want it to be relevant for.
Tersh Blissett: [00:33:13] Ok, so you want a local page that separate from the blog page and you want to link the two together internally.
Bill Russell: [00:33:22] Correct. So in other words, if I’m writing a page on AC repair services in Savannah. Right. And I’m going to write content on why to choose. OK, Service Emperor. All right. I want to intern and that’s about AC repair. I want to link that to your AC repair page through a hyperlink on the blog that will allow that page to pass the juice when Google cashes in indexes the blog to the internal page.
Tersh Blissett: [00:33:52] Ok, so what if you have a Pooler, a Savannah, a Richmond Hill, Tybee Island, Wilmington Island, like those local pages.
Bill Russell: [00:34:07] Well, you’re going to have a good time living in Savannah, if that’s the case, because of all those good pages, but what you want to do is make sure that the contents that are structured around that main page incorporate those different locations into it.
Tersh Blissett: [00:34:22] Ok, now you’ll still don’t need to create a new blog post for each one of the local pages.
Tersh Blissett: [00:34:27] And it’s not bad to have those local pages as long as they’re not the same content as duplicated and then just changed the word Tybee Island to Willington, is that right?
Bill Russell: [00:34:36] Correct. Duplicate content is bad, right? OK, duplicate content is really bad if you want it to be unique to that particular noncredit. There’s only so much I can say about air conditioning repair. So when I have 70 localized pages all saying air conditioning repair in whatever city it might be, you put yourself in a position that you can see where that internal duplicate content is. And once there’s a tool, it’s called site liner, siteliner.com, you can put your you are in it and it’ll scan your entire site and it will give you information such as what’s the amount of duplicate content on that particular Web site. OK, what’s the common content? Are there broken links? And it’ll tell you right off the bat you have too much duplicate content.
Tersh Blissett: [00:35:29] Now, does it tell you a percentage? And I’m sure that as soon as you figure out the perfect percentage, Google is going to say SYK and change it on you.
Bill Russell: [00:35:38] But we would generally say that anything is greater than between 18 to 20 percent duplicate content. It’s going to start to hurt you in your overall aspect of what you’re doing.
Tersh Blissett: [00:35:49] So you really have to have like…weeh? I’m not creative I’m glad I pay some money to do this because, I mean, i’m not a copyrighter here.
Bill Russell: [00:36:00] No, either am I. We have great ones on staff and they’re really talented at what they do, but it’s not it’s not something I’m good at.
Bill Russell: [00:36:09] I’m lucky if I can get through my kid’s seventh grade or eighth-grade essay without having a dramatic. That’s what they make grammatically for.
Tersh Blissett: [00:36:18] Yeah, that’s a that’s the little green thing at the bottom of your screen. Whatever it’s called, you live like it’s one hundred and twenty bucks a year. I will pay it. I will be like man that your stuff makes so much sense. You don’t have grammatical errors on Facebook. I’m like, yeah, it’s not me, trust me.
Tersh Blissett: [00:36:41] Yeah that’s cool Bill man. I honestly like I wrote, I mean I was writing like a mad man with questions and stuff as you were talking. Like I said at the beginning, we could go for hours. No doubt for people who have more questions, want to connect with you more. What’s the best way for that to happen?
Bill Russell: [00:37:00] Yeah, I’m pretty easily found on LinkedIn that, you know, Bill Rowsell or you can look me up at on Facebook or just hit me up and BRowsell@1seo.com R s e l l at one echo dot com and the one that’s not spelled out this a number 1.
Tersh Blissett: [00:37:22] Bill Mann, I appreciate you answering all my questions, and I know some of them probably are stupid questions, but hey, no questions, a stupid question.
Bill Russell: [00:37:30] I think there’s a famous old saying stupid is stupid, does it? If you don’t ask the question, you don’t get the response to what you’re looking for. Listen, I am totally I’m totally sighted. We got to spend some time together. I think that this was awesome for for for me as well as for your listeners. And, you know, by all means, if anybody has any questions, they can hit me up directly.
Tersh Blissett: [00:37:53] Awesome man. Thank you so much. And thank you to anybody that’s listening to or watching this episode of the Service Business Mastery Podcast. This this. As you can tell, this is something that while I don’t do digital marketing and I don’t have a digital marketing agency, it’s something of interest to me is something that I love having conversations about. And this is also one of the biggest topics that we get asked about. Like if somebody sends me an email, I can almost guarantee you that somewhere in that question is something to do with digital marketing or just marketing in general. And so with that being said, don’t hesitate to reach out to me while I can’t immediately respond to anything you if you send me an email, you’re going to get an order, respond to that. Only check my emails twice a day. And so it’s legit. I try to check them as often as possible, but don’t hesitate to reach out to me. Service Tersh at Service Emperor dot com. I think my email address Tersh at Service Emperor dot com t e r sh at Service Emperor dot com. I said that like twelve times to send me an email if you have a question. With that being said, thank you again for listening to this episode of the Service Business Mastery Podcast. It is a podcast focused on service business owners, managers, and technicians who may be considering becoming business owners themselves. I hope on today’s episode we answer some ask questions how we probably opened up a few rabbit holes for you and you probably have a few more questions and sorry about that, but until next time, stay safe.
