Episode #14 – How To Get Your Painting Company in the Google 3 Pack in 2022

Transcript:

Well, welcome back to another episode of the Service Legend podcast. Today is a special day and I have a real treat for you guys. I have my business partner and co founder of Service Legend with us today, Marco Cipolla. Welcome to the podcast, brother.

Thank you. Thank you. Well, those who don’t know me, my name is Marcos Cipla, partner and CMO here at Service Legend, and I guess I can finally call myself co-host of the podcast. So it’s good to be here.

Yeah, man. I mean, obviously the intro is like talking about you being here and so yeah, man, excited to have you here. Yeah. And for those of you that haven’t met Marco or don’t really know who he is just yet, he really runs the operations of the business on the back end with our with our director of operations and our leadership team and really focused on kind of developing the delivery systems and fulfillment systems and things like that in addition to running the company with me. But so he’s, he’s like our ninja in the back end from Google and SEO and content, things like this. And so he’ll be dropping some knowledge today. Today’s episode is all about how to get your painting company in the Google Map three pack. And these strategies really can work for pretty much most home service companies, especially coding. But today we’re going to really focus on painting and some coding in there as well. Also, if you guys are tuning in live, I see about 15 to 16 of you that I can see here from stream yard. If you could post in the comments, hashtag live. If you are tuning in live and then if you’re tuning in on the replay, if you could post in comments hashtag replay, it gives us a good idea of who tunes in live, who tunes in on the replay, things like that.

Also, if you could post in comments the the name of your business and the city that you are tuning in from. This also gives us a really fun idea what’s going on. James We’ve got a live one. We got one on the hook. This gives us a good idea of kind of who’s tuning in from the company perspective, but also like where you’re tuning in from in the country. So it’s always fun to get a good idea of where everyone is tuning in from. Oc Enough housekeeping here. This episode again is going to be focused with Marco and I going over some very specific marketing tactics and strategies that you can go implement yourself if you’re not a service legend client. Obviously we we do done for you services here so we can do all of this for you and you can focus on building your business. But if you are doing this yourself, maybe your owner operator, maybe you’ve got someone in house, maybe you’re just trying to figure all this out by yourself, whatever it is, we want these strategies in these tactics to be able to be digestible so you can go in and kind of implement these things yourself if, if, if you need to. So without further ado, Marco, before we get started, anything you want to comment on or or or bring up non specifically.

I mean, Ryan, I’m really excited to to get the in-house or in-person podcast going as well. So that’s going to be very fun. Those will be coming shortly to you guys and we’re going to maybe do some live there too as well.

Yeah.

But let’s jump straight into into the conversation today. And so we want to talk about what happens when you rank in the Google map pack. And so obviously the topic we’re talking about here is is ranking in the top three Google listings in the map pack and specifically for painting businesses and concrete coding businesses. And let’s talk a little bit about what happens when you get to the first three. If you’re in the top three, obviously you’re going to get more phone calls, more leads, things like that. And the whole idea is once you get there, your business is going to totally transform. You’re going to get more phone calls, more leads, more business opportunities and ultimately generate more authorities on your website can do so much better as well. And so what we’re going to do today is we’re going to go over the five pillars when it comes to getting your painting business into the top three map pack and exactly what it takes to to to get that. So let’s just jump straight into it here. The first thing I want to talk about is obviously claiming your Google business profile recently. Ryan, I know we just talked about this. The Google obviously changed it from Google my business to Google business profile and there’s some adjustments there that they’re making now. Oops, sorry about that. The whole idea is you have to claim your business profile in and and by the way you can get this for free at business dot google.com. So if you’re a newer business out there checking us out, definitely go do that yourself before you even work with a marketing company. Now there’s a couple of basics. We’ll go over here and that is number one. Here is your business name, your category of business, hours of operation, your basic nap information as people would refer it to, needs to be consistent on your Google business profile. And that’s step one. So start that verification process, get it going. Without this pillar being completed, you can’t really complete the other one. So very, very critical there.

I is honestly. Like what’s funny about this is sometimes we get newer clients that are maybe doing less than a million and they’re like, I didn’t get started because I didn’t know how to to get started. I didn’t know. Like there was one or two questions. When I was on boarding with this and it stopped the person from from going. So like I just want to add like. There’s going to be some things in here that are going to have some friction or they’re a little uncomfortable. But just push through that, you know, and a part of this entrepreneur journey and home service, there’s going to be random things like this that that that can kind of stop us from moving forward. So I just encourage you to, you know, that, that you can do it and that it’s not too challenging to kind of get this page started.

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Ryan. Tell us a little bit about your success with Concrete Cardinals, concrete coatings. Google my business.

Yeah, well, you know what’s funny? Like, so when I started Cardinal. You know, we started out with about $5,000 in ad spend and really just marketing budget set aside for the first three months. And so we had five, five grand a month to play with and we went all Facebook, all Google ads. But then we started SEO right away as well on the website, but also on on the and B now it’s called G. Bp, I guess. But and you know, what’s nice now is we rank in the three pack for both of our locations. And, you know, these are really the some of the best leads that we get. I mean, obviously, Facebook’s great, it’s a volume game. But these phone calls that we get from our listings our. Man our gold.

Yeah. I mean obviously we’ve seen with Cardinals brand anyways we’ve seen I don’t know probably north of 50% of the leads come from just just that map section so yeah very very very, very critical for business. So let’s jump right into the second one here, which is really about building domain authority and. Building Domain Authority is is kind of like an ambiguous thing, right? Not a lot of contractors. We even want to think about things like this. And that’s what we kind of see on the client business. But. It seems easy, but it’s actually quite challenging. And just to name up a couple of things again, that is going to help and you guys could do your individual research and we could even assist further on this. You want to build up the number of backlinks on your website. You obviously need a website and IAP conversion friendly website. In other really big ranking factor is the like how long has your website been like? What’s what’s the lifetime of that of that website? A brand that is from 2010 that has a website ever since 2010 is going to have a really big advantage over a brand that starts three years ago. And you obviously want to get that website going. You want to make it SEO friendly and build up the number of backlinks on that website so you can build authority, which in turn is going to because Google obviously when you index your website with Google, Google owns GMB or Google business profile. And so it’s ultimately going to help out there, there as well. The third thing was one of the most important components is in terms of getting your business profile ranking is building quality citations and I don’t want to get too technical and things like that just on a podcast here, but you may ask yourself like, what is a what is a citation, right? And Ryan, could you tell us or at least the audience.

Here.

What citations are and why they’re important? Cardinal obviously built those things like that.

Yeah. I mean, so like citations really are directory listings and so, you know, like when you start your business, a lot of times this is not done from what I know, from what we see in the data that we have with our clients. And so, you know, you know, a citation, a directory listing could literally be you listing yourself at the BPP, you listing yourself on Home Advisor, you know, you listen to yourself on Yelp and there’s obviously a ton of other ones, but those are some bigger names and those are really listings online where it has your business name, your address, your phone number, like your nap information, your name, address, phone number. But you know, these things are going to change all the time. So like when you first when we first started Cardinal, we were in Scottsdale and now we’re in Phoenix. And so, you know, it’s important to optimize these and ensure that the listings are accurate because this is really, you know, how we tell Google who we are, where we’re at, how to contact us, etc.. And then when this information is accurate across all of these citations, all of the listings, but it’s also accurate on our Google business profile listings and it’s also accurate on our website when the when the Google bots online. Right? Like when they’re crawling these sites, when they’re crawling your website and you’re listing and they see that everything is accurate, it’s up to date and they can verify that with Google Maps and there’s people searching for your business and and there’s not a lot of bad reviews about not being able to find you and things like this.

Google starts to understand and be like, okay, they’re a legit business, right? Like and you know, we can recommend this business to our, our, our, our users because we’re going to be recommending a legit business where they can actually get a hold of them, they can find them and things like that. So it’s really mission critical in my opinion, when you first start your business to start claiming the directory listings, the citations, and you can do this yourself when you’re first starting out. Obviously we do this for our clients and our mastery program. We do all the SEO, all the citations, you name it. We, we completely done for you services. But I would recommend if you’re starting a company right now and there’s tons of people getting into this industry right now, claim your directories, claim your citations, make sure they’re accurate and really have a task set aside for yourself on a monthly basis to make sure that everything is accurate. Right? So if you change your phone number or address, you know, maybe even as little as, you know, let’s say you went from cardinal concrete coatings as your as your name to cardinal concrete coatings, comma ink dot. Right like that still needs to be updated across the web because that could be confusing to Google and the algorithm because again, this is this is an algorithm. These are bots, right? Like like they’re not like a human behind. They’re going okay and like and they have like a, you know, a conscience, right? Like, so you’ve got to make sure that you’re giving accurate information over to Google.

Yeah. Yeah, that’s exactly right. Obviously, we recommend depending on the industry you’re in, looking into sort of the most lucrative citations for that industry. And we all know the popular ones, you know, Yext, Yellow Pages, you name it. However, when what Ryan you’re referring to is 100% consistency across the NAP information, which is your name, address and phone number. And so as long as that is 100% accurate and consistent at all times across all those most important listings and, and I would go for quality over quantity. So instead of like 100, that’s a big one, let’s get ten quality ones. Right? And that will definitely help move the bar forward. And obviously, if you change your business name or you’re changing your address, just make sure it’s all updated across the entire board there. So good, good, good. The next one is reviews and proximity. And obviously, we all know get more Google reviews, get more reviews online. Improving your reputation is going to help sort of build the brand and take it to the next level. Now, the reviews on Google Maps is. It’s really, really critical. And the reason why is because when in order to get to top three, you know, if I go search for company as I go search restaurants, I don’t care what you search at the top three, you’re always going to have businesses and brands that have a good reputation.

Google is going to recommend people who have good reputation in the marketplace, and that’s all common sense. Now, the question is, is what do you like? How many should you get to? Where should you push your views? Should you put your reviews to Google? Should you pursue reviews of Facebook, etc., etc.? And we recommend that you get your first like 50 reviews on Google before you start kind of pushing to different areas. And obviously what we’ve noticed is like from 9 to 10 is a big change. Once you hit 50, it helps out even more. 100 I was just on a call with a client and once you’re at 100, it’s transformative. It really changes your rankings. Ryan What is what is one of the most effective ways to build Google reviews for painting brands and things like that?

Yeah, I mean, like, so there’s so many different ways here to do it, you know, you know, if I can, if I can categorize this in order of importance and. You know, I guess the most frictionless way to do this and the most efficient and productive would be to have your actual technicians that are doing the jobs, your painters that are doing the jobs. As for reviews after completing a project. So that means when you’re when you’re you get a. Let’s say you’ve got a team of four painters just completed. I rise repaint. The crew lead should be capturing a five star review on the spot before even leaving that home. Now, obviously, you want to have some anticipation from the the dispatcher, the scheduler, the office manager, whoever it is, the salesperson, to give them some context and some some anticipation that we’re going to be asking for that. Right. So you don’t want the crew to ask for that when they first start. But that’s the best way to do it. Let the customers know that you are here to make a 100% satisfied customer. You’re there to serve the customer, crush their job, whatever it is. But also we are here to earn five star reviews and Mr. Customer can’t wait for, you know, Bob, he’s our crew lead and he’ll be asking you for a five star review after completion of the project. Of course, if you’re 100% satisfied. And so you’re starting to kind of like put those types of things in the customer’s mind before. So that way it makes it less friction for the crew lead to go and grab that real quick. And a lot of times people aren’t going to do it because they don’t know how to find it.

They can’t find the link. We make it confusing for them. We make it hard for them. Again, more friction. Not going to have as much done there. So that’s kind of number one is in-person is best here at service legend we have a tool called Service Legend I it’s a private labeled version of high level and there are some automations there. So you can just drop your your your opportunity in the customer stage and it’ll automatically send out a five star review request. So that’s included in the Service Legend Blueprint or the Mastery Program. So that’s an automation there. Another tool that’s really, really cool that we recommend here at service legend is is nice job. Nice job is a really awesome tool as well that you can use really affordable. And if you are a service client you can go to the to the service legend academy. This academy is where we house all of our resources and trainings and things like this. And there’s actually a discount promotion that we’re running right now with jobs in the vendor village that that we have. So you can go grab that there or just go to drip jobs. But if you do, make sure you let them know that service agent sent you, that way they can help you out and get you guys that discount code. Those are the three things that I think work best is in person with proper expectation set that we’re going to be asking for that. And then you go on to using an automation tool like high level and we do it within our programs or software like nice job.

Yeah. I heard you say drip jobs. Obviously, we recommend drip jobs, but no, it’s nice job.

Nice job.

Clients in service academy can find it. After a 14 day trial in there. So, yeah, it’s good. And the other thing I’d like to say was in regards to proximity, you know, proximity plays a major role in getting local rankings as well. Now, this is because you’re close to where the Google searches are. And we’ve all looked on Google Maps where your location is and you kind of see like, okay, a do business up here in the northern area or southern area or wherever you want to do more business in. And you’ll kind of see the more it gets afar from that address, you’re going to start to pop up less. And that’s because it’s based on proximity. And there’s probably your competitors, more companies closer to that area in terms of their address and where their GMB Google business profile is located. So I would say it’s not a game changer, right? Don’t change your your address just because you want to get closer to where you want to do business, obviously, because you could focus on other things like SEO landing pages and things like that. However, just keep that in mind that maybe when you expand to a new location and new a new new city or what have you and you’re looking to get an address, you could keep that in the back of your mind because it can be pretty transformative.

Proximity is very, very important, the way I look at it, Ryan, like here in Phoenix for Cardinal anyways, there’s definitely a lot of competitors, there’s a lot of similar company size, there’s smaller companies. However, I would say it, there’s not as much noise as like garage doors or HVAC or plumbing or even like roofing. And so the ability to rank and like 30 miles away is greater because there’s less contractors now training businesses like we’re talking about today. You’re going to have a lot of noise, at least in a lot of these metro areas. And so what I would think is, you know, the further you get from that address, the less like you’re going to pop up and you can start to build any pages for those different areas. It doesn’t mean you can’t rank there, just obviously it’s going to take a little bit longer and the optimization process is a little bit a little bit different there.

Yeah, 100%. Could you also this could be a little confusing, but could you screen share or just go to Google and type in garage door service Phoenix? Like just type that in. And I want to give everyone kind of an insight. Obviously, this is more of a garage company that I’m gonna show you guys, but it’s a really good example of I think I can actually. There we go. I got the safari out there. The third is in garage. Garage door service Phoenix. And the reason why I’m having Marco do this, guys, is, is because if you scroll down and you look at a one, obviously, this is Tommy, by the way. Shameless plug here. If you want to come to the number one home service event, it’s next month, October 12th to the 14th. And you can sign up through our link, which I’ll go back and post in the comments. But it’s a amazing conference put on by Tommy and a home service freedom and it’s called Vertical Track. And you have everyone from Brandon Vaughn coming to speak out live, all about operations. Megan likes financials. You’re talking Ken Goodrich, who owns the shuttle. That’ll probably do 300 million this year. It’s incredible. So you’ve got seven, eight and nine figure speakers. Everything from financing, you name it, come to the event, it’s worth the investment. And that’s what I’m talking about.

Right here is a one garage door. If you just look there, like so like if you were a homeowner and you. I had an issue with your garage door or whatever. I mean, over 4000 reviews now. They’re not. Not. They’re not all five star. There’s some bad ones in there. I’m sure there’s some mistakes that the company might have made. You know, we’re all human. We all make mistakes, including companies. But just look at the difference there. I mean, you’re talking over 4000, the closest one just in three back there are 736, which is still incredible. But if you go below even that, I mean, no one’s even touching triple digits like a one is right or true. Quadruple digits now, I should say, actually. But you know, what’s incredible about this, guys, is, is it’s instant social proof. And the world we live in today is. Impulse. We get things right now. And so if I’m a homeowner, I’ve got an issue. I see that I’m going to click that, go to the website, make a phone call, fill out a form, book my own appointment, whatever it is. And I can make that decision really quickly when that’s a big separator right there. So I just wanted to point that out that that, you know, it’s it’s something that is massive, massive for the business.

Yeah. I mean, as you scroll down here, you got organic and then you got the map section and you probably have an ad up here. Let’s say it’s all about dominating, dominating page one as as Tommy says.

So all over, I think they say from last I looked, Marco and you can correct me here, but the last I read was over 45 or 48% of all clicks on page one of Google are in the map three pack. And again, I could be wrong, so correct me if I’m wrong, but I think it was about 45 or 48%. And so literally almost half of all of the clicks from a visitor going to Google. So they’re typing in epoxy flooring, exterior paint or near me, whatever it is about 45 to 48% of those people that are that are looking for your services that you offer are clicking in that map pack. And when they click in that map pack, there’s only really a couple of things that happen. They call you from the map pack, right? So they call you directly from the listing. They show up at your at your at your door because they saw the address. Right? So that’s number two. They click over to your website and call you from your website, phone number, or they click over to your website and fill out a form on your website. Right? So there’s only a couple of ways that they can kind of get through that next process. So just think about that. Over almost 50% of all first clicks from a from a visitor on page one of Google is right in that map pack and there’s four called actions in there essentially that can happen. So I mean, it’s it’s it’s to me as a business owner for Kardinal with our team here, it’s mission critical to get shown up there.

Yeah, 100%. Well, folks, let’s jump into the fifth one here. This is the fifth and final pillar for obviously getting your painting business or concrete coating business into the map pack. And by the way, I hope this has been helpful. So if it’s been helpful, put help on the helpful in the chat there. So the fifth one here is website optimization. And this is the last pillar of getting your business profile to rank on Google in the map pack. And we could go on and on here. Obviously, there’s a few things right off the bat I’d like to mention about website optimization, and that’s just basic things like your title tags, your meta descriptions and even like the headings. So the bigger text that you see on your website, home page and service page, things like that, those are going to be direct ranking factors on your website, obviously, but also to your Google business profile because they’re tied tied together there. And Ryan, there’s a ton of things that we could go on about website optimization. What do you feel that is something pretty actionable for for the listeners that can fairly easily do on their website today?

I think some basic ones as we’re talking about Google business profile is like on the footer of your website, you know, you want to have your address listed there, your phone number listed there, maybe an email listed there, obviously your business name. But on the footer of your website, which is the bottom piece of your website, you want to make sure that that is accurate. With all of the citations we talked about, all the directory listings we talked about. So for example, I guarantee you sometimes when you go to your footer after a year or two years or whatever, when you got your website built by the last marketing company or you did it yourself, sometimes those are different, right? And so that’s what we’re talking about is make sure that just all the information is accurate on the site and make sure it’s accurate consistently from everything else you’re doing. So like if you’re building landing pages for your Google ads, if you’re building landing pages for, I don’t know, an event that you’re running or a promotion or whatever, make sure it’s all accurate. And I think a lot of times that can get missed by not having things organized or documented. In addition to that, what I see a lot of companies do wrong, you know, because obviously I’m on the more of the sales and marketing side of the company, Marco’s, you know, really overseeing the operations and different things like that when we’re on sales calls with clients. And, you know, I think one of the biggest things we see on websites is the H one. So like if you scroll up but go back to the H one there.

So Arizona’s leading concrete coding company, a lot of times companies will have things like. Beautiful. Epoxy something, right? Like it’s just silly things. You know I can’t stress enough have your h one’s have the right geo tag. Right. Geo keyword. So like Phoenix, Arizona, you know, if you’re in LA, whatever it is, but also the, the proper keyword that you’re trying to rank for. So like right here, you can see we got epoxy garage floor coatings and we have Scottsdale. So this page is most likely going to rank for the keyword garage floor coatings, right, or epoxy garage floor coatings rather, and then Scottsdale as well. So the geo, you know, for the people in Scottsdale. And so a lot of times people don’t have these things in there. And what what Google has come out and told us is the top five ranking factors is they look at the PH one right away. So when someone sees or when when someone searches for these these terms, Google is going to crawl the website. And the first thing that they’re going to look at is the H one. That’s one of the first indicators that’s going to basically speak back to Google and let them know kind of what we’re looking to rank for. And so just make sure that that’s optimized as well. And that’s an easy one that you can do yourself if you if you’re not working with us or another company. That’s a big, big, big one. So h one, make sure your footer and all your nap is correct on the website. What else are you thinking? Marco is important.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, obviously, one quick tip I’d like to point out there is and I’m not sure if you had mentioned or not earlier, but is your Google my business or Google business profile in bed? And I’ll kind of show you here if this helps. On the screen here for those who are watching live. If I search cardinal concrete coatings. And we find the Google business right here, if we click on the map section. So it just shows up as as our brand or the client or what have you. On the left hand side there, you’ll see this button, the menu button. You click on that and share and embed map. This simple function is going to help tie your Google business profile to your website, which in turn, if you’re following those best practices that Ryan just kind of laid out, have an SEO friendly website, mobile friendly, your H one tags, your title, description, title and meta descriptions, and you embed this similar to what we have here at the bottom of this site right here. It’s going to tie the website to your Google business profile and that alone is going to really throttle your Google business profile to that top three map pack. And that’s actually something very actionable. And you guys can honestly do that really quick. So. That’s good.

Yeah, I love that, man. You know, it’s like, obviously, in my opinion, as as business owners running a coding or painting company, it’s it’s best to offload the marketing to whether it’s service legend or like another company that you feel comfortable with, whatever it is. That way you can focus on running your business. But if you’re starting out, you’re smaller or or you feel like you want to do this yourself, you should be able to kind of rewatch this, you know, this podcast and spend just over 30 minutes here. You should be able to get into some implementation, some execution and some actionable steps here. And he guys have any questions? Let us know. Of course, obviously, we we we we only have done for you services right now. But the Facebook group is a great place to jump into and ask questions and things like that. And we just want to see this this industry grow. And so we want to try to add as much value as possible here. So.

Yeah, 100%. And even like I’ve seen some some comments in the Facebook group, even just like somebody asked me a quick question and other people contributing, I find that so awesome because we have like minded individuals in our industry and we’re all trying to promote each other’s business and really promote our knowledge and things like that. And so even like simple GB questions, you put them below this, you know, this common stream in, in Facebook group. So we’re all here to help you guys and obviously a service legend you guys. Now, we do have Blueprint Mastery programs, which would help you out with with all this good stuff as well.

Yeah. And that wraps up this this episode. And if you guys have any questions, let us know we’d love some feedback on the Apple and the Spotify platforms as well as well. So if you wouldn’t mind jumping over there, you can just type in service legend podcasts and give us a review. That would be awesome. We’d love to hear feedback on these. We’d love to kind of know what you guys would like us to talk about. We’ll be doing some more of these, like ranting, you know, style pods coming up. You know, we have our we have our playlists for interviewing clients that are doing really, really well. We call those the client spotlight sessions. We have our vendors that we’re going to be interviewing, whether it’s manufacturers, distributors later this month, we’re going to do a webinar with Jill’s office talking about virtual receptions and different things like that. We’ll be doing some hiring stuff, but we’d love to hear, hear out like what you guys are interested in hearing as well. Give us some good context. Give us some ideas and thoughts to to brainstorm on. But outside of that, guys, we look forward to seeing you guys on the next week episode and have a great weekend. We’ll see you guys soon.

 

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