Well, good morning, good afternoon and good evening wherever you are whatever time of day it is. We really hope you're enjoying your day, your time, and we appreciate you tuning in to our podcast here at Plumbing and HVAC Profits.
This is Episode 1. What we're doing with this podcast really expands upon the messaging that we're putting out there for marketing, for plumbing and HVAC companies. What you're going to find here on this podcast is it's going to be short, sweet, and to the point, and maybe it'll expand a little longer down the road.
Right now, you really want to get to Internet marketing issues that are going on. Tips, ideas or how to improve your rankings, and search engines and social media, help your company get better rankings and in a result, get more calls and you even get better ROI on your marketing dollars.
If you don't receive it, Plumbing and HVAC Marketing Profits is a monthly newsletter that we send out to a lot of our clients and prospects.
In here, we cover two different things really. We cover Internet marketing trends and things that are happening in the industry, where if you're not a customer of ours that you can maybe look into or do to help your business grow online.
If you are a customer of ours, rest assured that you are taken care of because the world on Internet marketing changes so frequently. It's so much like the stock market. You have ups and downs constantly all the time. We just try to maintain good rankings and good calls.
Our January issue of Plumbing and HVAC Marketing Profits was a very good one. Our goal here was to pack in a lot more great information that you can use and really put to work today, 2015 Internet marketing plan. You can read about that on our blog as well if you go to plumberseo.net/blog.
There, you'll read write up on it. Also in this particular issue, we talked about some books that you need to read in 2015.
What we're going to do is extend it here to the podcast. Every month, recommend a couple of books that we've read. We recommend contract to read, because if you're not reading, you're not learning.
We are so big here on sharing books, and different blogs, and things like that to help educate our team. You should do the same with your team, your plumbers, your office managers, whoever. You need to keep them constantly reading new things and learning new thing.
The two books I want to recommend today are "E?Myth Contractor," by Michael Gerber. Now, I didn't read this particular book. I did read "E?Myth," by Michael Gerber though. All that he really did was change it up a little so it really pinpoints the contractors. So if you're a plumber or HVAC person, this might not be a book you want to recommend to your employees. They would probably get bored with it, but as a business owner, you should be reading this.
I try to read The E?Myth once a year, just to re?motivate myself. The E?Myth is what changed my business life. It really made me focus on things I was doing wrong. Once I actually opened my eyes to it, it really showed enormous growth in our business. The whole premise is, you as the business owner should be working on your business and not in your business.
If you're a plumbing company, you shouldn't be doing the service calls, and the same thing if you're an HVAC company. You should not be doing the service calls. You should be working on the business, coming up with marketing ideas and plans. Not so much doing the marketing or the Internet marketing, putting the right people in place to do that, and overseeing it all and managing. This is a great, great book, and I think you'd get a lot out of it.
The next book I recommend, "Eat That Frog," by Brian Tracy. What I have found is that procrastination is a massive killer for any aspect of your life, and especially in business. The old saying is, "Don't put off until tomorrow what you can do today," and that's what Eat That Frog really covers.
Brian Tracy has a host of really good leadership and sales books, but Eat That Frog is really designed to end procrastination. It's really starting off each day with taking on your biggest task, the thing that you absolutely positively don't want to do.
He calls it a frog, because what is a frog? It's a big ugly amphibian, green, slimy, don't want to touch it, you don't want to get near it, and so by eating that frog first thing in the morning, the rest of your day should be smooth sailing, because you're not thinking about that one problem that you have to take care of.
Like me, and I'm sure you might have experienced this, if you put off that one task that you don't want to do, it bothers you. It eats at you all day or all week or all month. Eat that frog every single morning, your day should be a lot better, and a lot more productive.
Great book, you should read it. This is a book that I recommend you buy, and give to all of your office staff, and your plumbers, and your HVAC technicians. Really get them in the mindset of avoiding procrastination, eating that frog first thing in the morning, because the rest of the day could be a lot more positive, and you'd be able to get a lot more done. Two great books. Definitely put them on your list.
Interesting that, I know that you're familiar, if you are a contractor with Angie's List, who is bigger than Angie's List. It looks like Angie's List is going to have a new rival, and that is, of all companies, Amazon. Amazon doesn't just sell books anymore. You can basically buy anything you want at Amazon.
Maybe you want to get a book, you will read a review. If you like the review, you buy the book. They extended that into music, into movies. You can buy toilet paper and have it automatically delivered to your house every single month using amazon.com. I do all my kids' Christmas shopping on amazon.com. Amazon.com has become my one?stop shop for basically everything.
I'm not singled out, the Amazon right now is one of the biggest online...got database of credit card holders in the world. They are huge. Amazon does everything right and Amazon really invented the online review. You purchase a book, you read the reviews about it, you read the reviews about it, you like it, don't like it, you buy the book, you don't buy the book.
What is Amazon's next big thing? Amazon's next big thing could be plumbing services and HVAC services. Let me change could be to is because now Amazon has added a new thing called Amazon Services. They did a beta program starting about in November.
I don't have all the specifics on pricing yet, because during the beta program there was no monthly fee to plumbers, to contractors I should say or to end users. What I do know is for the contractor, if your ticket item is $1,000 or less, you pay Amazon a 30 percent fee. If it's $1,000 or more you pay Amazon a [inaudible 07:08] 20 percent fee.
A couple of ways to look at this. When I first learned about this, I learned about a couple of plumbing HVAC forums and there was a lot of complaints about it saying, "Wow, 30 percent is a lot of money. Why should I give them the 30 percent, that's ruining my profit margin."
The way you need to look at a service like this is, you need to use this as your...foot in the door, lead man type of service where you're just getting a customer's name. Let's face it, it costs money to acquire new customers, regardless of how you're paying it.
If you're paying it on a per service fee of 20 percent or 30 percent or you're paying a marketing company 3,000, 4,000 dollars a month or you're paying the yellow pages $4,000 a month or $20,000 a year, whatever your advertising costs are. Customers costs money and new customers are very expensive.
That's why that's the easiest customers and cheapest customers to sell to are the customers you have already acquired. As you're doing whatever type of marketing you're doing, you have to have a tool in place that captures the clients name, captures the client's contact information and that can be telephone number or an email address.
It's great to have an email address. I would say it's better than a phone number. The same is said for this Amazon selling services. The way it works is very much like Angie's List, the customer searches for a plumber or HVAC contractor in a specific city. From November to January, in January they were ticking it off in beta. It was supposed to go live on January 1st.
I am searching around and I couldn't get ahead on where it was, if it was totally out of beta yet. I'm going through a little bit about where it's launched? How to use it? It's really in loss, if you're going to catch all your clients there and don't capture any information from your client.
In other words, someone goes to Amazon, they're looking for a drain cleaner, or tankless water heater, or an AC repair service. They do it [inaudible 09:12] , Georgia, your company name comes up. They read reviews about your business, if they like what you see, they make the contact through Amazon services. Amazon Services sets up the service call for you.
Amazon Service bills the client, they pay the credit card processing fees. You don't even have to worry about collecting the check. Amazon Services sends you a check minus their 20 percent or 30 percent where ever your final balance was. This remember costs money to capture clients. You can look at this 20 percent or this 30 percent in a negative way. In the sense that yes, that it could be a lot of money. Some businesses, 20 percent or 30 percent is all the profit margin there is.
Once you get this customer, it's pretty much your customer. Unless of course you don't capture their user information, or worse yet you capture user information like the email address, and you don't do anything with it. I think a lot of contracting businesses do that. I myself have used plumbers in the past and never been re?marketed to. That's unfortunate because again it costs money to acquire the customer.
If you can keep your name in front of this customer on a regular basis, let's face it a person may only use a plumbing company twice a year, but doesn't that person have friends and family who are constantly looking for good reliable plumbers or HVAC contractors?
There is this stigma that everyone feels they're going to get ripped off, or the person's not going to do a good job and so on. Everyone wants to know someone who used somebody, and if they say good things about you, well that's great. When using a service like Amazon Services, as you get your ticket signed, when you're about to leave that job, get their email address and just say, "Hey, we send out a email newsletter. Hopefully you can refer us to some friends. We send out coupons. We send out specials. We really send out good..."
I'm not going to go into how to do that. We'll save that for another Episode. The main thing here is you want to capture that information. The last thing you don't want...no one remembers who you are. We have a lot of plumbers and HVAC contractors throughout the United States. They all can get hung up on their telephone numbers.
We try to talk them into using tracking numbers on their websites. Tracking numbers are great because, I'm not going to go into all the nitty gritty of it, it allows you to see how many calls coming you receive from your marketing efforts. What happens with a lot of plumbing contractors and HVAC contractors is everybody knows my number.
Well, that's not the case and don't think it is here either with Amazon. If you think they're going to remember your phone number, you're insane. I don't even know my mother's number or my wife's cell phone number. Everything is in my cell phone. That's my digital brain and that is the case for everyone.
It's not like it was 30 years ago, and we remembered everyone's phone number or we had little magnets on our refrigerators. We don't have that any more, because now we all have stainless steel refrigerators and magnets don't stick to them. Stop thinking that people will remember your phone number.
Capture that contact information, and send them the monthly emails and email newsletter with good information. I'll go into what is a good email marketing program that you can put in place to help your business grow by marketing to your existing client base. That's basically what you have to do here.
The last thing you want them to do, a potential customer that you serviced, in say August is when they need you again. April they forget who you are. They go and look you up on Amazon and guess what, you just rang up another 20 to 30 percent fee when you didn't have to. It's important to build a client database from services like this, like Angie's List, any type of service like these.
It's important to do that. The Amazon thing is a great service because they already [inaudible 13:10] and I haven't heard anything else about it yet. They haven't really marketed it, but Angie's List should be nervous because Amazon does it. Everything they do is right, everything they do is big. They've got a lot of money and they've got a lot of marketing dollars behind them.
They have a massive database of every single credit card. People like to do everything in one place and Amazon is that one?stop shop. Don't think, "Oh my god, 30 percent, that's a lot of money." It really isn't if you know how to use the service properly.
Just to give you an update on where they've launched in their beta program, they've launched in a few cities in California, a few cities in Florida, Georgia, Atlanta, Kentucky, New York, Texas, Washington, and Wisconsin, in very few cities. I guess they're testing it to see how it goes and marching it across the country. Look out for it. I think it's going to be a great thing for contractors. You really need to get involved.
With that said, I want to talk about what's going on in the world of Internet marketing. It's really interesting how much Internet marketing has changed. When we specifically talk to a client...there's a lot of misinformation out there in the world of the Internet marketing, and SEO and Search Engine Optimization, SEM and Search Engine Marketing. There's so much different information.
It's very hard, even for us, when we work with our clients. They're constantly being fed information from other sources. Sources like other companies trying to sell them Internet marketing services. It's a challenge because there's so many bad guys out there in what's called the Internet wild, wild, west.
A lot of business, plumbing, HVAC contracting companies, have been ripped off in the past. We try to do good by our clients and keep them informed, and keep them going along the way, and trying to get them results.
Internet marketing is so granular, and it's so massive, and it changes so fast, and something that you think worked six months ago could get you in a lot of trouble today. If you're doing Internet marketing yourself, it's really important to stay on top of this, of the information, of the Google algorithm, of what's happening, and let me tell you, even for us as an Internet marketing company, it's a challenge to stay on top of it, how often it changes.
I can't even imagine not being an Internet marketing company trying to stay on top of it, in other words, trying to run an HVAC or a plumbing company and also trying to stay on top of Internet marketing, would be nearly impossible.
Google changes its algorithm quite a bit, and the understanding here is this. Google wants to deliver the very best information to its searchers, and so that's why it's changed so much, so frequently. You could rank a website years ago by plugging in a few keywords, writing some text, plugging in keywords in every sentence, get a site ranked. Sites read very spammy, but they ranked.
Understand that Google has a whole web spam team in place that scours the Internet looking for, human beings looking for, and Internet search spiders looking for sites that break their guidelines. They're out there all the time looking and knocking sites down, so it's important that you stay on top of the different Google algorithm changes.
There's another one coming that's going to be pretty big, on April 15th. Google doesn't always tell us when they make algorithm changes. They just happen, and as a plumbing and HVAC contractor, there's no way you would ever really know if you were doing it yourself, unless you read all the SEO blogs. There're so many of them.
You have to know which ones to read to piece it together and cross?reference things to find out what you think is wrong or what you think is right.
But occasionally Google will jump in and say, "OK, this is what we're doing," and they release a new one that's going to help out with mobile search, and the reason they're releasing it and saying, "OK, on April 15th, this is what's going to happen is, because they want businesses to get ready for this. If you don't have a mobile site, or maybe you do have a mobile site, it may not be ready for the new Google algorithm change.
If you're getting a lot of business, if you look at your Google analytics, really what you should be seeing right now is about 30, 40, in some cases I'd say 50 percent of the visitors to your website coming from mobile devices, mobile devices being an Android, an iPhone or an iPad, or any type of tablet. This is considered mobile traffic.
Websites that are not mobile optimized, in other words, if you go onto your iPhone, or your mobile or your smart phone, and you bring up a website that looks exactly the way it does as it does on your computer screen, you're going to have a problem here. You may be getting searched now, but you are not going to get any search after April 15th.
Or if your site does look like it's mobile optimized, there's some testing you have to do to make sure that it is indeed optimized for mobile, and so we are in the process of, a lot of our sites, are ready and mobile optimized, and they're good to go. There're a few older ones that we're tweaking right now, and they'll be ready by April 15th.
What is Google looking for? There're a lot of criteria that they look at. Number one, there shouldn't be a whole lot of information that's on the website. The buttons need to be certain distance apart so that fingers can properly touch them. There should be a "Click to Call" button, pages load speed has to be very quick.
Google has a testing tool that you can run your website through, and even if you do have a mobile website, it may fail, and then you have to go back to your provider to get them to tweak it and fix it, because what's going to happen, if you're getting 30 or 40 percent traffic from mobile now, and your site's not optimized.
Number one, it's going to be hit with a tag that says, "Not mobile optimized," and you're going to lose your rankings.
All of the sudden, could you imagine on April 15th, if you lost 40 percent of the traffic to your website? Because that 40 percent is not going to be made up on a desktop, because people are still using mobile phones. The reason SEO has changed so much and it's not really dependent on the keyword anymore is because of this mobile search. The way people search on mobile phones is so much different than the way we searched on our computers.
When we're on our desktop computer and we're searching, we may type in "Atlanta AC repair," or "Green Bay, Wisconsin heating service." Whatever way we search, the thought process of city plus plumber, or city plus AC repair, is not as important as it used to be.
If you've ever heard anybody here at Plumber SEO talk, we're constantly talking about the long?tail keyword Google Analytics reports. They'll see keywords that people are searching on, and if you'll notice there, there are multiple keywords put together, or multiple words to form a short sentence, a statement, or a question that someone is either typing or talking into their mobile phones.
There's a lot of voice search right now. People don't pick up their phone and say, "Miami Plumber." They say things like, "I'm looking for a reliable plumber in Miami, Florida," or, "I'm looking for the best plumber in this place," or "My water heater is leaking. Who should I call in Fort Lauderdale?"
Long?tail keyword is a major factor in the way we're ranking sites today. If your SEO company is not taking care of the long tail, you're losing of opportunity there if you're not ranking for long?tail keywords. You can't say what a long?tail keyword is. I can't tell you, "OK, you have to be ranking for 'who's the best plumber,' in your city," because not everyone searches like that.
When you look at your Google Analytics report, you're going to see numbers like a certain term with one search on it, and then a very similar term below it with two searches on it, so people don't search or speak exactly the same way.
But on April 15th, we just want to make sure that your website is good to go. All of your competitors who are not ready for it, who are not working with an SEO company, of course, their sites are going to drop, leaving opportunities for you to rank higher. April 15th is the due date. Make sure your websites are mobile optimized. Just because you have a mobile website does not mean it's mobile optimized.
Get it checked out, and if you don't have a mobile site, what are you waiting for? You're missing the boat. There's a lot, a lot of opportunity out there, and it's only going to get bigger and bigger. Less and less people are searching on their computers, on their laptops, and the mobile market is just exploding bigger and bigger, and mobile devices, and now with smart watches coming out, if you're not mobile, you're in the past.
Stop counting on "City plus service" keywords that you might not be ranking for, because you could be missing a world of opportunity by not concentrating on mobile devices and long?tail keywords. I hope you can get that done.
Anyway, like I said, I want to keep this podcast short and sweet. We're just probably at about 30 minutes, if not a little less. I hope I shared a lot of great information with you.
I hope you liked the podcast. If you do, take some time to leave us a review on iTunes, because what that does for us, not only does it stroke my ego, and that alone is extremely important, it really helps us rank higher and get search easier in iTunes. It helps us out a lot. This was Episode 1.
Look out for our newsletter. Visit our blog as often as you can, because we're constantly posting a lot of great information there as well as where the podcast will be posted, and that is plumberseo.net/blog.
If you're an SEO client, we thank you for being a customer of ours. We love you, and we really appreciate your business. If you're not a Plumber SEO client, and you're looking to be one, visit our website, or give us a call, 1?866?610?4647.
Take a look at your website, see what you have going there. In any sense, the time you spent with us today, we really do appreciate. We know your time is valuable, and we'll see you next week. Thanks so much.
Great podcast!
I'm going to research your blog for more tips&tricks.
Looking forward on hearing more from you soon.
Great podcast!
I'm going to research your blog for more tips&tricks.
Looking forward on hearing more from you soon.