 Hey, good afternoon, everybody. Tom Stewart here. I'm with Derek Christian. This is Smart Business Moves. How many? Thanks, Armie. Whoo! What is it today? Twenty-third of March. Can you believe? Twenty-second. Don't take my days away from me, Tom. I need them. Are you behind? I'm so behind. You don't even want to know. Look at grief. Everyone's always impressed. Like, you have so many companies and I'm like, ask me if I like having so many companies. Well, there's a solution for that. I'm working on it. I'm narrowing them down. Liz is transitioning from another commitment. She's going to be here momentarily. She will be here while we're waiting for her. We can talk about what we're going to be doing the rest of the week. How about that? What's today? Twenty-second. We're talking about SEO in plain English today. What's the fun in that? If we do it in plain English, people might understand what you're talking about. I know. You can't charge as much, but I'm not selling SEO services. That's kind of the secret of these SEO companies. If everybody understands what they're doing, that could be part of their business. They always just say, well, you've got to trust me, it takes six to seven months to see any results. So sign a long-term contract and you'll see results eventually. That's one of the things we want to do today is kind of talk about what should they be doing. You know, that's funny because if you've been doing this long enough, I mean that was a pitch back with traditional advertising, be it like newspaper or direct marketing or radio fill in the blank. It's like, well, it's going to take months before you see any benefit of this. So just keep struggling those checks and keep the faith. That's one of the reasons why I like the company I'm actually with now is, A, let me do a month for free and we'll show you what we can do in a month and I can cancel any time. So I'm like, cool. I like that much more. So what else do we have on the agenda? You've got me up, but who else is speaking? I'm just looking here. We've got some folks here. Travis needs coaching. Hit us up, Travis. Actually, we're doing a foundations event. Will, should we talk about that? You're freezing on me just a bit there, Tom. No, I'm going to pull up another website here. At least I'm efforting to. Well, I'm doing that. Travis, I'll get back to you on the coaching. Hey there, let me in. Wow, this must be a popular topic, Tom. I don't think I've seen this before. He wants to know the secrets to SEO, scan the Navy. No idea what TJ is throwing at us today. You don't have to explain that one, TJ. We're at a loss. Hey, Don. You can see him. Hey, Leslie. Welcome. There's a, who somebody is in cognito mode. Okay, Travis is in Louisiana. So tomorrow, we're going to be talking about pay, price, productivity, and efficiency. It was a model that we built actually. I kind of introduced it as part of the Juno Summit. And I got a lot of good feedback on it. So we're incorporating that into foundations this year. As an add-on, it's a different model where I'm managing those four metrics. You can get predictable outcomes on top-line revenue and bottom-line profit. And it's pretty cool. And Wednesday, Liz is going to be talking about improve recruitment to improve retention. Because it looks like at, would you say the market is supply constrained at the moment? Can't find enough people to clean homes. Is that what you're hearing, Derek? Yeah, definitely. The shortage of people is a big deal right now. Nobody can seem to get enough. And every company I'm involved in right now, it's labor that's the constraint. Yeah. So part of it is being able to recruit better and being able to hire more people. But a bigger part of it actually is hiring the right people and figuring out how to do the things in your business like training and proper onboarding and the right culture. And there's a long list of things that I guess over the last couple of months we've been talking about off and on that if you hire the right people and keep them, you don't have to hire as many. And that's really the heart of the solution of the product. Yep. So what about Lauren? She's interested in SEO companies, perfect timing. Yeah. Yeah, she asked if we were sharing mine. If you want, you can message me and I will talk to you about the SEO company I use. Like everything there is a trade off. So I always want to kind of tell people about the company before I send them over just so you kind of know because they are going to give you homework. And if you're not willing to do the homework, you're going to be grumpy with them. Tom and I were just talking at the beginning of the call because he just signed up with them. I was like, so how's it going? He's like, they're giving us a lot to do. I thought I was sharing this, but I wasn't. So again, tomorrow is KPIs with a new model that I don't think many of you have seen. And Wednesday, we're going to talk about how to improve our retention to help deal with our staffing challenges. And then we're going to swing around to client management on the following week. And Derek, you're going to be talking about sales as a teachable skill. Yeah. Everyone tends to think that sales is all about personality and it's not. I remember meeting a sales trainer named escapes me at the moment really doesn't matter. But the guy was like an engineer by training and he was the most dry, boring person you could ever find. But from a sales standpoint, he got outstanding results because he had a workflow, he had a methodology, and he just followed the recipe and he was disciplined. It was like, it was more about being disciplined than it was about being talented. I guess there's an overlap, but it doesn't, he was kind of an example of it didn't really matter as much as your God given talents. If you had the discipline to follow the recipe, you can get results. Yeah. And I mean, I worked lots of sales jobs in my life and it's all about numbers. When I was at P&G, we used to have to make 20 sales calls a day and you do the right things, you hit the right numbers. By the way, TJ wants you to explain it in Scandinavian. Anybody can do it in English. That makes sense. I'm not so good at Scandinavian. And Leslie doesn't want to do her homework. Okay. So Tuesday, the following week, we're going to be talking about stacking revenue and all the techniques to get high frequency recovery revenue. And Wednesday is going to wrap it up with Liz talking about how to control our quality standards. Yep. Oh, this is kind of wrapped around foundations. We'll be talking about that a little bit later. Here's a link if anybody wants more details. Foundations is our week long coaching program that we do. We all cram into Beach House and work intensely on our business. And this whole point of these two, three weeks is we're kind of doing some samplers of what we do there. So just to give some idea of some of the stuff we get into. Anything exciting going on in the news, Tom? You know, I've kind of had my head buried today and a few other things that I haven't been keeping up with. I don't even know what the stock market did. What did I mention there? Stock market did, but they're talking about a $3 billion jobs and infrastructure stimulus plan now. $3 trillion, I mean. $3 trillion. And so about one and a half times the $1.9 trillion they just did. And the $4 trillion they did last year in total. Yep. I've not seen too many of the details. They're just calling it job creation and infrastructure act. So all of this is just dead. You know, one-tenth of all of the dollars floating around in the world was printed in 2020. Oh, wow. So, and that was, and since then, we just printed another $2 trillion. We're planning on printing another $4 trillion? $3 trillion. $4 trillion. $3 trillion. I'm sorry. You just said $3 trillion. Good grief. Yeah. I feel old. I'm old enough to actually see inflation in action now. And I measure it in weird ways. When I used to work in the comic book story, it was $0.75 for a comic book and it's $5 now. I'm like, I won't even buy these things anymore. They're too expensive. Well, it depends what a dollar is worth. Yeah. So you want to take us into SEO in English? We'll jump into the exciting world of search engine optimization. So allow me to share my screen here and switch over to Google. Hide this so you guys don't have to see it all. So we're just going to start by talking kind of the sections of Google. And a lot of people know this, but there's always different people on these calls. So I've got to kind of start at a basic level and work my way up. In this example, I did a Google search on maid service for Collins, Colorado, because that's when the city is where there's a cleaning company that I'm involved with. And a lot of you guys know this, but up top here, this is Google local services. It's a service that Google launched about three years ago and is constantly changing. Basically, it's a paper click type model. And then we've got the good old fashioned Google paid ads here. There's not too many of those. We're discovering that these guys up top are kind of killing off the traditional paid search. Then you've got what we call the three pack or the map pack, which is where it's showing your Google local business results. And then at the bottom, you've got what we've always referred to natural search, once again, showing my age once upon a time when you typed in something, this is all you got down here, but that that's now on the bottom of the page. So when we're talking about search engine optimization, I'm not including the paid stuff. A lot of search engine optimization companies will help you with your paid ads because a lot of the skills to search engine optimization are very similar to the skills for paid ads. But while we cover this stuff up here in foundations, I'm going to kind of start at the map pack. So most people know this, but once again, just to be sure the map pack here comes off of your Google, my business listing or Google local business listing. And this is the free listing you get from Google. And honestly, we're finding up to 70% of our leads are actually coming from this, not from down here. So honestly, the bigger part of your search engine optimization game is probably to get into this three pack, not down here. Although we are going to talk about both of them because, hey, call me crazy. I'd like to get the one third as well as the two thirds. But if I had to pick which one to do first, I'm going to concentrate on getting up here into the map pack. And the company I'm involved with is reliable cleaning, which is this one right here that's going to pop up. And there's a couple of things that come into play on actually showing up in the map pack. The first thing is of course, actually having a legitimate address where Google is going to accept your address. They normally send you a postcard out to prove that you actually exist. A lot of you guys have done this before. The other thing which really helps with the map pack and you can kind of tell by looking is reviews. The more reviews you have and the higher rating, the better you're going to do. One of the things that's not as obvious is what is actually in your Google listing. Google is kind of an interesting company. In fact, all of the search engine optimization company or all of the internet companies are kind of the same. And that they've got a little bit of an ego. They tend to think that the most important thing is their own service. And what I mean by that is one of the things that's going to really help you with your Google listing is to just fill out everything. If they've got a category for it, fill it out because Google thinks the most important platform in the world is Google. So how on earth could you be a real business and not have a detailed Google My Business listing? How could you not fill out all of those great features and products they give you? So for example on mine, you'll notice we've got the reviews, but right under it you've got the list of products and we've actually gone in and filled out all of the products with nice little pictures so that people know what our products are. A lot of people are not filling these in on Google and that will help you to have an advantage. Part of it is because you're going to be hitting these key phrases. So when people are typing in deep cleaning, moving clean in, these phrases are popping up. But honestly, a lot of it is just because Google wants you to fill out your Google profile all the way. They're going to want you to have categories filled out and once again, including your subcategories. And they're going to want you to have lots of pictures. The other thing which helps a lot that a lot of people aren't using is the questions and answers. And so what can happen on this is you can actually have your friends or family actually prompt you with questions. And you'll see if you look at our questions, some of the questions are designed potentially to help Google find us. So do you offer post-construction cleaning? How much do you charge for this size house? What's the price of a deep cleaning package? Because when you look at these questions, what do those questions look like to you, Tom? I'm having a hard time reading it, Derek. Okay. Can you read? I mean, I can see the... So for example, one of the questions is, what does your deep cleaning package include? Another one of the questions is, how much would you charge me for a move-in cleaning on a 2,500 square foot house? The questions that are being asked are questions like people would potentially type into a Google search. So that's why having questions and answers on your Google profile helps. Now, unlike other things on your Google profile, you can't just go fill this in yourself. What happens is people need to ask you questions and then you need to answer it. But like I said, you can cheat and have your friends and family help you fill these out. So you can have people basically email people and say, do me a favor, I need you to go to my Google profile and ask some questions. Here's three questions for you. And then you answer them. Google also wants to see that you respond to your Google reviews. There's some debate on this, but I have heard from multiple people that it helps if your Google review actually includes some comments like what city people are in. So for example, we say things like, we love doing the office cleaning in your Fort Collins home or your Fort Collins business because we're trying to hit that phrase, office cleaning and Fort Collins in our response. So when we're responding, we want to make sure that we A, respond because Google likes to see that, but we also want to try to include some key words in our responses like what cities we're servicing. Even the name of your cleaning company could be advantageous. Yep. To try to include that in your responses. Thank you. Well, I will clean gloves to hear feedback from our happy house cleaning customers in Fort Collins. Yep. Yeah. And also try to change up your responses. Once again, Google doesn't like to feel like a bot responding to people. So you don't just want to write the same thing over again. Thank you for your kind of review. We appreciate it. Don't copy and paste your response. Use it as an opportunity. So like I said on ours, we'll typically try to look up where the customer lives because a lot of you guys, because I've worked with so many cleaning services now, don't have the same problem we do, but Cincinnati's actually got 17 distinct neighborhoods in Cincinnati and 32 suburbs. So to service Cincinnati, I'm not trying to hit Cincinnati. I'm trying to hit what is that 50 different 49 distinct places. People don't think of themselves as Cincinnati. They think of themselves as blue ash Hyde Park. So those responses give me an opportunity to say, thank you so much. We love all of our customers in Hyde Park, Ohio. You know, we've been servicing it for so many years. Now for Collins, I don't have that problem. There's like five cities we service. But for a lot of us, like it, for example, you guys in Atlanta, Tom, I know have the same challenge where you just serve us a lot of very unique suburbs and those responses give you a chance to fill it out. The other thing that I've heard from lots of people and I'm not going to get into all the detail on this because once again, this is designed to be a sampler class because Google doesn't like you to be lazy. Google gives you the option to say we service people within a 25 foot radius or the ability to pick specific zip codes. It seems like they do better if you pick specific zip codes. Like if you say, yeah, we do everything in 25 miles, they're kind of like, yeah, sure you do. But if you actually bother to pick specific zip codes, they go, okay, yeah, you must really care because you're bothering to go in and pick those specific ones. As you see when it comes to pictures, they have a lot of categories for pictures. You're going to want to fill them all out. You're going to want to fill the categories out for team photos, for office photos, for all of those different categories that they're going to give you because all of that stuff is going to help you rank higher. And a lot of it is because once again, Google's got a little bit of an ego and Google thinks that their platform is the world's most important platform. So how on earth can you be a good service and not use all of their things, which includes the messages that you can post. It includes the ability to message people. I don't know if everyone knows this, but Google actually has an app that you can download on your smartphone, and it's the only way you can do it is on a smartphone where people can send you messages through your Google business listing and then it goes to your smartphone. The more of those features that are enabled, probably the higher you're going to rank. And Tom, I don't have split screens going, so am I getting any questions I need to try to cover? Not yet, but if you do have a question you can just drop it in chat and we'll be glad to answer it. Yeah, for those of you who don't know, I typically for these presentations just kind of go and don't have a planned agenda. So I typically go where people have questions. So if I'm saying anything that makes you go, wait a minute, back up, call it out and we'll go over it. Another thing that is really important when it comes to your local listing for Google is what's called citations. And citations is anywhere on the internet that your company is mentioned. And there are a couple of key things about citations. One, more is better. So the more times you can get your name, address, phone number and website listed on the internet, on non-spammy websites, you don't want to just go on every contest site on the world, but real websites, the better for you. And I find a lot of times people are missing some real low-hanging fruit of high-value websites. For example, a lot of people don't have a Bing listing. We may not think of Bing as very highly, but they've got very high what's called domain authority, which basically explains how highly ranked a website is within the world, and we'll get to that in a little bit. Apple Maps. I find a lot of people don't have their Apple Maps listing up and running, which when you talk about all the people who are using Apple devices out there, more and more data for things like Siri is being pulled out of Apple Maps, not out of Google. So why on earth would you not have your Apple Maps listing? So you want to have as many citations as you can, which is places that your name, address, and phone number are listed. And it's also very important that they be consistent. So for example, the way we have our address listed here is something that we cut and paste. Anytime we list our business anywhere, we always list it as 1414 Blue Spruce DR, not drive, Unit D, Fort Collins, Colorado, 80524. You don't want to change it around and say, D, drive, DR, you want it to be the same over and over again because despite how much Google will talk about how great their machine learning is and how they can figure out what synonyms are, it seems like even small changes sometimes confuse it. So if you say sweet instead of unit, they don't always catch it. And this could actually be a challenge for some of us that have moved a few times because my cleaning company at one point was growing so quickly, we moved three times. So cleaning up our citations was really key to helping us rank higher. So they need to be consistent and you want to have as many really good ones as you can. And don't forget about the easy ones like Bing, Apple Maps. Of course, everyone gets their Yelp profile, but there's a bunch of them out there, Four Square. A lot of times things like setting up your LinkedIn profile is a very important citation. Are you actually going to get much business off of LinkedIn? No, probably not. Most house cleaning companies don't work LinkedIn for leads, but it is a citation. It is a place with high rank that your name, address and phone number should be listed. Hello, Liz. Hi, y'all. Liz. I'm trying to catch up on all the notes. I'm glad you guys were able to hold the fort down for me. It's been, well, I actually got a lot of people here today. Everybody wants to know about SEO and plain English. We had some requests to do it in other languages, but we figured that we'd be more effective in English. Yep. We had some requests, but... Hablo solamente un poquito español. So it would be bad if I did it in another language. Susan's got a good question. How do we list our business on Apple, Bing, so on and so forth? Sure. Well, honestly, on a lot of them, you can just look it up. If you go to Google right now and type in, how do I list my business on Bing, it's going to tell you and it's normally free. The SEO service I work with actually sends me homework assignments. Here's the 10 websites I want to get your business listed on this week. Go get your profile set up. There are also some other services you can use. Oh, I'm forgetting. Oh, I've used one called Up City before, which will also walk you through those websites and what you are and where you should think about it. But there's pretty good instructions online for if you Google most of these. And name matters. For example, one of the things that helped us is we used to just be listed as reliable cleaning. We changed it as reliable cleaning services of Fort Collins. Why? Because people Google cleaning services and people Google Fort Collins. So your name matters as well, which is why, you know, Paul's on here saying, made in Mexico, here I come. Believe it or not, having the name made and the name of the city you service in it is helpful. So once again, when it comes to that citation listing, know what that means is everywhere we list our business now we are listed as reliable cleaning services of Fort Collins, not just reliable cleaning. Or a country. Yeah. Right, right, Liz? Yeah, right. It's like you read my mind right there. Well, that actually leads to another topic, actually, a little bit, which is it's actually hard for one listing to rank for too many things. Google, and this applies both to your website and to your Google My Business listing. At the end of the day, the more stuff you link, think of it as dividing your authority. So all this stuff, you do basically builds your authority with Google. Your citations builds your authority. The names you include builds your authority, filling out everything on your profile builds your authority. But the more things you try to rank for, think of it as dividing it. So if my cleaning service has enough for the sake of math, I'm going to say an authority of 100. And I'm saying I want to rank for reoccurring service and one-time service. It's going to kind of treat that as 50-50. It's going to take my authority and divide it in half. If I start deciding I want the same profile to also rank for my carpet cleaning and for my window washing and a bunch of other ancillary services, it's really going to drive down my domain authority. And that may not be terribly relevant immediately and be super obvious. But just to give you an example, I think a lot of you guys know that I own a handyman connection as well. It's for me to do search engine optimization on because we do so much stuff. And the more stuff I try to rank for, the more I take my authority and divide it. So I don't rank really well for any one term. So same thing can happen on a cleaning service. You don't want one profile that covers six different services. It's actually a lot harder to rank. You would almost be better getting different profiles with different addresses to rank, which if you were going to do that, you would need to have things like a real physical address and things along those lines. So don't try to rank everything at once. You're going to rank a lot faster if you pick one or two key things and then add more things with time. So don't overreach. If you occasionally clean windows here and there, that's awesome. And if somebody asks you, you can do it, but you're probably hurting yourself if you try to rank for that. Exactly. If you offer window washing and carpet cleaning, maybe even through an affiliate partner, and you offer it so you have a full package so that a customer who wants to move out clean can get everything, you can. But I actually wouldn't add it to my Google profile because at that point you're trying to rank for too many things. And think about it. Google doesn't want to make it so that one company ranks for everything. Otherwise, Amazon would be the number one for every single thing in the world. So the more you try to rank for, the more difficult it's going to be to rank for any one thing. Be careful about listing every service under the sun. It can come back and bite you. Yeah, that makes really good sense. Right. And that's why, for example, you don't see a lot of the big national companies always ranking real well in the local listings because it also applies to geography. If they're trying to rank too many cities at once, it can backfire. So you want to be careful. What about Lauren's question here, Derek? Which one was that? I was just telling Tom I don't have a split screen. She wants to know, what would you list if you have multiple locations? Okay. Well, if you have multiple locations, first of all, you have to actually have multiple locations. And that's perfectly fine. For example, in Cincinnati, we have two locations and that actually helps our ranking because it's easier to rank in each one. And for example, we're crossing into different sections. In Cincinnati, they have different landing pages. So our blue ash listing is blue sky services backslash blue ash. And our other one is backslash Westchester. We're not pointing them to the same website. Because remember, citations is important. If I list the same exact website on two different Google listings, it can backfire. So it's okay to have one website with two backslashes and go to the sub pages. It doesn't always have to go to the home page. Hopefully I'm explaining that well. I feel like I'm rambling a little bit on that one. Well, you know, we do it within Castlekeepers. Yeah. And each physical location has its own page. And each physical location, each city has its own Google My Business page, its own Bing page, its own Apple listing page. And you can see all the citations for all of those. And you build them out like three different websites, kind of, but it's all under one general domain. And then underneath these brands, you can build out city pages. And you might get to that later on, but that's doable. It just kind of cascades down from there. So I don't know how much I missed. I mean, obviously I know I missed a lot. It was awesome. But that's amazing life changing. And I get to go watch it. So, which, you know, I will. All right. So my question here, though, on this section right here. I just heard you say two things that seemed like they were going against each other. So Lauren was asking, if you have multiple locations, it sounded like you said, have two different businesses like with separate addresses. And then for the title, you would do whatever, like I think we're doing reliable cleaning services at Fort Collins for one, and reliable cleaning services of Linwood. Or the other one, or Loveland. Or would you write reliable cleaning services backslash Fort Collins, reliable cleaning services backslash Loveland. So you can actually do both strategies. If you, remember, you're going to divide your authority. So if you can build one website strong enough, you can split it by two, you're probably okay. In the example you just gave, where they're kind of in the same metro area, to some extent it makes sense, where it gets tricky is when you divide it out to more and more locations. For example, a lot of you know I'm involved with Blue Sky Services. And Blue Sky Services, Minneapolis, St. Louis, Cleveland, and us, and I'm forgetting the last one, Cincinnati. And then we offer window washing and maid service in multiple locations. Our SEO companies actually recommend it and we are in the process of breaking our one website up into different websites. Because we're trying to rank for too many cities, we're trying to rank for too many services all in one. And so we are going to be breaking that up in the future. That's kind of, Lauren's asking that here as well. She says that she's trying to rank for corporate, it's windows, and cleaning, which you need different websites for and can I do them all in the same web address? Once again, you can, but the more you try to rank for, the harder it's going to be. And it's going to vary by market. In some markets, it's easier to rank than others. I wouldn't want to be in Atlanta trying to rank for carpet cleaning windows and maid service all at once. It's hard enough to rank for one service in those markets. If I was in, you know, a smaller city like Akron, Ohio, I maybe would go for it because it's easier to rank. So part of it is also what you're up against, but you're going to be better if you break it up. For example, specifically in Cincinnati, we are for both maid service and window washing. And I don't know if all of you know the history, but Blue Skies traditionally was window washing and my maid service was the home cleaning company and our SEO company is actually recommended that we split it up and have two different brands again. That they're like, listen, you can't rank for both. You can't rank for two different brand names again and answer the phone as Blue Skies and my maid service. So we're actually working on spinning the brands out independently again because we were trying to rank for too many things. So you can rank for both, but you got to do it under different titles, different names. Right. You can't have like the same Blue Skies window cleaning and residential cleaning and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. That's where you're going to get into trouble. You want to have different locations and different websites supporting each. So we are talking mostly about the Google local listing. So what we've touched on a little bit accidentally is actually back on the actual main website. So let's go back to our search and scroll down a little bit and we're going to come down here to the natural search results. And this is when people used to talk about searching and optimization, what they were talking about the most. I'm going to come down here to reliable cleaning and drop that one open for us. And one of the things which really matters a lot for search engine optimization is what people do on your website. And one of the reasons why is Google's caught on that a lot of people have figured out how to game Google and do keyword stuffing and buy backlinks and do all sorts of gimmicks to raise their web ranking. But one of the things Google's figured out is people can't cheat how people behave. And what they mean by that is somebody types in Fort Collins maid service and they go to this website for reliable cleaning and then they press back and go back to Mali Mades. Google over time is actually going to decrease the search result for reliable cleaning. And the reason why is Google makes all of their money off a search at the end of the day well most of their money. And so what happens is if somebody goes out there and searches for maid service Fort Collins goes to reliable, presses back and goes back to Google and then picks a competitor Google basically records that as a download I gave you an answer and you just liked it so much you left it went to another website. The opposite thing happens if somebody comes to your website and actually books a service and gives you a credit card and the world of Google they figure that's the biggest upvote in the world. You asked for something I gave you an answer and you bought something you must have liked the answer. So that is why for a long time a lot of launch 27 companies that were allowing online booking were ranking so quickly and outranking a lot of us traditional companies wasn't necessarily that they were better they had more reviews but they were letting people key a credit card in on their website. And Google sees keen and a credit card is the ultimate upvote. You bought something you must have been happy. I agree with Google if people are giving you money they're happy versus if you're leaving and going somewhere. Well like I said you can do all sorts of things add fake keywords and create landing pages and do all these things to trick people to get to your website but if they get there and they don't pay for something Google is going to say you must not have liked the answer. Now it's all what's going on versus other website searches too so if nobody lets anybody buy anything it doesn't matter. If there's five websites and one website Google starts noticing credit card transactions and the other four don't Google over time goes people like this website they buy stuff. The reason why that's important is you don't necessarily have to let people do a book it now feature it's almost as good if somebody fills out a form so if somebody comes in here and does a form request Google says you must like this company you gave them your contact information you wouldn't have given them your contact information if you didn't want to talk to them. Or if you've got one of those buttons on a cell phone for click to call where it physically calls at the time that's also good. The point is you want to get people interacting with your website you want to get them filling out forms getting downloads the more active they are with your website the higher you are going to rank over time. Because the number one thing Google wants is people to find what they want and they figure if they come to your website and they look around and they don't do anything that's not good. So you want you want to drive engagement. Are there any special considerations between mobile versus desktop? I know notice a lot of times as managers of businesses we spend a lot of time looking at our website on our desktop but most of the people who are consumers are doing it on their phone aren't they? Yeah, phone is now more than half of searches so A it's important you realize what your website is going to look like on a phone and does it make sense. And once again that click to call button which shows up on mobile is super important. Once again that's once again Google doesn't tell you how they rank things but I got to believe somebody calling you is as good as doing a credit card. They're taking action they're physically talking to somebody. And I find a lot of websites that phone number isn't enabled for click to call which is silly it's a little line of script to make it work. I think probably just people are in the same boat as me. There's so much you don't know. There's so much you don't know and there's so much we're trying to do every single day and it's tricky. And it takes time. I mean we were talking earlier that Google wants what's your love and that equates to time and they want your engagement so they want you logging into your Google My Business page uploading pictures and adding content and they want you to be doing it frequently and encouraging your customers to give you reviews and it just used to be advertising was about spending dollars and you can still spend money on advertising but it's as much as time and calories as anything else. Yeah and search engine optimization honestly and I always explain this to people it's like 90% grunt work. A lot of it's just really boring grunt work. Did you go to Google? Did you post a comment on your Google business profile? Did you respond to all of the reviews? Have you uploaded any new pictures? So that all matters. Yeah there's so much stuff that needs to be done. So I'm using a different SEO company right now and stop asking me for so much information. I told you they work to get a lot done and they ask you for a lot don't they? Yeah they really do. That really makes you recognize though that it's a lot more they're doing a lot of work even if you're not recognizing a lot of results in the beginning. I know that's so hard on people when you're dealing with SEO is you're not seeing a whole lot for that first couple of months at least and for a lot of times you're looking at at least 90 days hard but it does make sense they're doing a lot. I don't know who did we have on Tom? I think it was might have been Greg that was saying that he really likes the idea or maybe it was I'm not sure. Whoever it was was saying they really want their SEO company to have a report so that they can see what's being done so in the absence of results they can at least see activity until they start seeing results. Yeah I believe it was Greg that was his assessment that a good SEO company would give you an update of all the activity that they engaged in over the course of the month just sometimes you might not see the results immediately but at least you want to know what they've done if they're getting you back links where are those back links I want to be able to click on them and see where I'm being mentioned on other people's websites for instance Yeah that's awesome so did you guys already talk about some of the stuff if you don't have an SEO company where you should personally start is there like a start is there a checklist one of the things that we like for a checklist is we use the service called Up City before that used to be $40 a month it's been a while since I used it so don't quote me on that but it's a self-help service that will basically walk you through step by step of how to do it yourself and they work off of a point system where they tell you these things are worth 100 points and these things are worth 5 points so that you know where the most important things are Mars does this too don't they Tom? Mars has some tools there's a handful of SEO tools out there you might want to check Up City I think they changed their business model I'm not even sure what they're doing what they used to do I'll have to check yeah like I said I haven't used them in a couple years as I've gotten bigger and have more companies I can't do it myself anymore so I'm outsourcing where I used to just use their checklist models but Mars is a good tool we use that you know SEM Rush is another tool that's very popular AH refs is pretty good and some of them are better at some things than others there's tons of great training courses I don't know if Garrett got stuck or if that was my internet I think he got stuck because we are you there Derek? yeah sorry it looks like I dropped out there for a second on you guys but I'm back all these tools that are out there yeah Mars local is pretty cool we were talking about citations that's a free tool that will let you know give you a pretty good snapshot of where you need to do work on your citations yeah Mars local does an audit for your local citations a lot of times honestly I just Google my own business to see all the different ways I show up particularly if you know what your old addresses are which is a problem for me I'm constantly Googling my business name in my old address which will give me places I need to find and I need to go fix it and they tend to repopulate sometimes so you gotta go back out there sometimes and play a little bit of whack-a-mole and beat them down all the time yeah that's quite the visual right there so what about did you guys talk at all about I'm sure that all companies are like mine I get three or four emails a week saying hey I'm happy I noticed your website is ranking as well as it should and I'd love to do a report for you and tell you where all the problems are and how we can help you are those like legit should you do those not do them like what what you're thinking on all of those I mean I'm not a big believer in it because I figure if you're a good search engine optimization company people should find you when they search for you shouldn't have to be reaching out to them and a lot of those unsolicited ones aren't real legit no that's interesting though because a lot of times SEO companies if you search for them they show up five pages deep does that disqualify them as being a legitimate SEO company depends how you're searching for it if you're searching for an SEO company specialized in your industry I'd say they should definitely pop up if you're looking for a local agency they should show up when you search local so it depends what you're looking for why would you want how do people decide do they want something local or do they want industry specific I would do one or the other industry specific of course has the advantage that they really know how people search for your service what has worked in other markets the advantage of someone local is just that they know the local stuff for example in Cincinnati people don't refer to it as Cincinnati we have 13 distinct neighborhoods Hyde Park things like that that don't necessarily if you don't live here you don't know you don't know the phrases people use and I like my SEO company actually updates my website so I want them to be able to write stuff that's relevant to the industry that people locally will read and have it make sense to them so you just said something that prompted another question for me should we be expecting our SEO companies to write for us to write vlogs or to be able to write content on our website or what did you mean I mean content to your website is one of the key things for a search engine optimization company because what they're going to be doing is creating the content on your site which is going to have a lot of the key phrases in it like service names for things that people search for because what Google does is they basically go through your website and they read it and when they read it they're looking for key phrases and this is actually a bit of a challenge for somebody like me because when I used to work at Procter & Gamble we were told to say a certain phrase over and over again and hammer it into your mind that was kind of the pushed version of marketing and the easiest way to explain it is Pringles we were told to never call it a potato chip it is a potato crisp and we wanted to get that phrase crisp in the consumer mind so all of our ads said crisp crisp crisp the problem with that in the world of search engine optimization if I only ever used the word crisp when somebody searches for potato chip they're never going to find me and the same thing happens on maid service and for example if you look at the reliable cleaning page that we have up right now I say it says house cleaning it says maid service we've tried to include all of the different ways that people would potentially search for cleaning service in the content of our page so we're trying to hit all of those key phrases which once again when I used to own my maid service in Cincinnati I was still an old school Procter & Gamble guy where all I would say was maid service we're a maid service we employ maids now I've learned that I need to say things like our house cleaners instead of always referring to them as maids because that actually helps us rank on those phrases and your SEO company should know what those phrases are and should help you get those phrases into the website now mine actually physically goes in and writes the pages for me but at a minimum they should be coaching you on what to do and I guess part of it too is figuring out what keywords you want to rank on and like you want to rank on maid service or house cleaning and depending on what part of the country you're in determines some parts of the country maid service is used more than house cleaning and vice versa and that's where you're asking about what's good about an industry specific SEO company and the one I'm working with does a lot of home cleaning companies is they know things like these FAQs at the bottom these are included on here not really for consumers let's be honest they're largely there for Google and so these search phrases they're there for Google to find how do I get in touch with a reliable cleaning service in Windsor Colorado and beyond that question is put there for Google that question is not put there for someone to get to the bottom of my page I did not know that if you get to the bottom of my page and you don't know how to find a reliable cleaning service in Windsor Colorado my web page has failed you that makes good sense you should have come to the conclusion that it was us who left down there for Google that's not really there for the people reading the page alright that makes perfect sense yep alright we have any good questions coming in because I feel like I'm spitting a bunch out here well we're not really at the moment Johnny's got a question it's not directly related SEO but I just want to know about websites and advertising in general he wants to know what websites are best to advertise on Meeks I mean how about retargeting where you know you're basically advertising on like say Google or Facebook to people who've been to your website no yeah I mean the reason why I said Yeek is that's a big topic it's not what I'm going to cover quickly obviously social media the places where people are Facebook is really good and once again what does marketing what do you mean by advertising for example I've done paid to ads on Nextdoor and they suck I work with a company that I pay influencers to mention me on Nextdoor and we do great from it so having people mention you in conversations on Nextdoor has been great for me paying for display ads on Nextdoor has been terrible so what do you mean by what platforms should you advertise on a lot of it isn't you know I could tell you to advertise on Instagram but I could also tell you how to advertise with influencers on Instagram which is a different strategy so there's a platform but then there's also a strategy to go with it and it's not a two-minute conversation well we're kind of we're kind of getting towards the top of the hour and what we wanted to do here since we're the whole context of what we're doing here is kind of giving you a highlight of what foundations is about is we've got a guest here we have Trisha Lake who's hey Trisha Trisha I guess has been to at least one foundation are we going to do? yeah I did too okay and Liz you had some things in mind where we wanted to talk about foundations a little bit well I just thought I'm going to bring Trisha on because she has been to two foundations one of the questions that we get from people is what's so great about the program I'm thinking if somebody has been there twice and is already registered for the third one she probably has a much better idea of what is great about the program than I do because we look at it from different perspectives Trisha I thought you could just share some of your basics and then if anybody has any questions about foundations specifically Trisha's your gal and so she's already been coached but I'm going to remind you again Trisha that foundations is and all of the programs are about your own personal perspective and what works for you and there's no right or wrong answers so you might ask her a question and she might say yeah I don't think foundations is right for you in your situation sometimes that's the right answer just kind of depending she's like now I'm trying to see comments here so I can know to answer them actually and Tom can be coming up on the screen for you too okay so you guys might not think like for you guys as teachers you've been used to doing this for so long that kind of old news to you guys but for me I felt like a sponge wanting to suck up as much knowledge and information as possible and the sponges can only suck up so much right hence why I want to go to every foundation as possible because I truly think that every time I continue to go I can learn more and more and more it's kind of like watching a movie three times like oh hey I never noticed that you know so just all kinds of knowledge that is great Derek went over my SEO with me he told me ways to improve it we're ranking wonderfully for SEO now there's just so many benefits it's just kind of mind blowing the spread we're a company that was fairly large going into foundations we already hit our million dollar mark and I had no spreadsheets I had no KPI numbers I just winged everything and I was just happy with life like that right we were successful but I didn't know why we were successful and that's how a lot of companies fail is because they don't know what they're doing I was just blessed with being I don't know blessed and successful I guess but knowing your numbers and knowing that kind of stuff helps you set directions of where you're going to go now we have awesome spreadsheet awesome knowledge about just everything a wonderful training program like we can hire 10 new employees in one week without stressing about it and now a lot of companies can say that you know and so we have really good systems in place now okay I do have some insight Trisha into why you were able to grow to the size you were with just kind of getting lucky and not having stuff all in place and you had something going for you that a lot of people don't have going for them and you don't you had iris right let's not forget about the people that you had so your people just like you can take yourself to a great level in your company without having all the support materials if you have that great person that's been with you for forever they also can increase the level that you can get to because they add in all of their knowledge to and their work they put in their additional work because those people don't just give you their 40 hours which is really closer to 25 or 30 hours and check out those people give you 40 hours and it's really more like 50 60 hours and they're still not checked out they're on the weekend like hey I forgot about blah blah blah so we had a St. Patty's Day parade we're in every parade possible and this was the first year that I wasn't in the parade myself my family and my little kids always are in the parade and my husband and I were talking and we're like our kids have never been in the parade we've always been in the parade and so this year we sat on the sidelines and got thrown little tiny pieces of candy and it was it was great you know and I watched my company go by and oh yeah and Iris managed everything you know so that was pretty cool yeah that is very cool that's very fun I love that so I just wanted to point that out for people because Tom is always reminding us that you can get lucky almost anybody can grow this business to a certain level through luck and whatever your personal leadership level is you can be able to grow to that size if you find yourself consistently going and a really good first point is that six employee mark right you got six employees back down to three back up to six down to four back up to six down to two up to 17 down to three again if you find yourself struggling right there then you probably need a little bit more and structure leadership you need something more as far as the foundations of your company you need to be built up a little bit so that you can move past that spot that's true like Tom says you can get lucky but what about when your luck runs out y'all okay and a lot of people their luck ran out during covid guys have seen a lot of businesses this went under and couldn't sustain when you understand how it's working when business conditions change when market forces change then you know how to react and I think that's one of the coolest parts about foundations is the inner workings of my own company and maybe why I've done what I've done but I didn't realize type thing and what's helped me is to be able to understand the back setting to be able to decide where to steer the company what is you know most profitable and what is not what's a waste of our time and you know we changed a lot of things from leaving foundations we opened up two more additional locations we have three locations now and so it just it changes your mindset because you just become more educated in the fine workings of a company yeah awesome well does anybody have any questions about foundations any anything that you're curious about that you want to know because you can get directly from the horse's mouth right here somebody that's been here twice that I wouldn't feel bad saying that about Tom but I actually feel bad saying that about you so how about directly from the expert's mouth referring to his other parts so I'll take horse's mouth as a compliment another part of the horse other than the mouth gone well you haven't so anybody have any questions if not I mean we are pretty close to being at the top of the hour Tom do you have a picture of the mansion I was just curious I do I do think that the mansion plays a part of the experience of foundations for the people that went through the online version of foundations their experience is nowhere near as intense or impactful as the people that went through with in the mansion there is one thing I can say with that too is that I first ordered the foundations online course that was my first step and then I sat with it for a couple months and I just could not push myself to do it it was just too hard for me to do it on my own and that's when I reached out to you and I was like hey I wanted the in person one and just getting away from your business for that seven days and being able to brainstorm with like minded people and work through these problems that was super beneficial which created long term friendships for years I have some of my best friends are from foundations and we talk daily and we are able to help each other through our company issues still today so that's a huge benefit as well we do have a question with Facebook user they know who it is no they are in a group so I don't Facebook user your name ends up being awful please give you everything that you need a hard copy workbook that is like this is Rochelle that's just a mountain of information we give you a flash drive that's got all the material and all the power points all the examples all the workbooks so really you can sit there and listen and think rather than trying to record everything it's you know you're also because you are getting into the MMA groups in advance of the foundations you're going to be getting all the information about what to bring so Rochelle one of the things that you'll need to have is all your KPIs you'll need to have quick books in order so that you can do the work so that is a huge piece of foundation is you learn the thing and then you do the work you guys have heard a lot about my snowboarding analogy you watch the video on how to snowboard but then you pop the snowboard on and you get on the hill and that makes all the difference in the world because once you start actually doing it you find out oh okay I can do this oh I get it so that's a big big piece of it Anthony yeah I'm excited to have you so we are smidge past the top of the hour um Garrett thanks for giving us the skinny on SEO in plain English that was good and we'll do another language next time we'll be right tomorrow we're going to be talking about pay price productivity and efficiency the PPP model of how to grow a cleaning business it's a different spin on something that I think you'll find very useful so we'll see you tomorrow at five o'clock bye bye