 So cute. Hi, y'all. Liz here. And today we are into, we are, we all love that cup, y'all. That's what I'm thinking about here. So I'm Liz Trotter. This is Smart Business Moves. Tom Stewart, my partner in this endeavor, is not here today. He's absent, but we have the lovely Maria Dorian acting as co-host for me today. Thank you, Maria. Thank you very much. You're welcome. It's like a mirror, right? Our guest is Dan Hearth. So I'm looking forward to talking with you again. I haven't talked with you in a long time, I feel like. Yeah, it's been a minute, Liz. That's for sure. But yeah, it's been a good at least six months, probably close to a year, I think. Yeah, it's OK. You're still responding quite well to your stuff. So I appreciate it. I'm glad to hear that somebody was here. I was trying to give you a compliment on air here. So yeah, I'm like, uh, that's not me, that's not me. I've probably already admitted to other people that. Well, you're not the only one. Let's just put it that way. OK, I'll say that. I'll say that. Hey, Dan, do me a favor and introduce yourself. Tell people who you are, why they should know you, you know, what we're going to talk about today. Sure. My name is Daniel Hearth. You know, I've been doing digital marketing for a company called One Clip Marketing. I'm one of the partners of our team of 40 in-house salaried staff employees. I've been work doing digital marketing now at our agency for over 12 years. So it's been a while now. I can't believe how fast time has gone before. Before that, I was a VP of a social media marketing firm for about three, four years. And then before that, it was in the corporate customer service as a membership director for a big resort called the Phoenician out in Scottsdale, Arizona, if you guys may have heard of that out there. But so huge, huge customer service background, marketing background, you know, in the cleaning industry specifically. You know, it was never meant to be a vertical of ours. We actually were purely focused on like remodellers, solar companies, lawyers, those types of things when we were first starting off. And then now we have 40, no, 48, 50 cleaning companies. We work with nationwide. And we've been working with that vertical now for a solid eight years or so. Ever since our first client, which was out in Los Angeles a while back. And, you know, we have had a lot of experience with the cleaning companies from the ultra successful to the ones that are just starting off. So I have a wealth of knowledge when it comes to this world and not only that, understanding how to create leads from an online standpoint for the cleaning industry, but not only that, how to take care of the leads in-house. A lot of the things that we see nowadays, especially since leads, especially in the summertime, are a little bit more difficult to come by for most home service-based businesses because of holidays and things like that. You know, you really have to account on what you're doing in-house a little bit more with how you take care of the leads. A lot of times people get leads throughout the week and then if they don't convert, that's all they do. It's like those leads go with the waste for the rest of the future. It's like they don't do anything about them. I mean, companies like yourselves pay so much money and time to create good leads. You know, but if you're not taking care of them, it's kind of like you're kind of hurting your own self. You become your own worst enemy in business that way. So, you know, that's a little bit of my background. I talk a lot, so just keep in mind I go into tangents. I don't mean to take over this whole podcast, but I can certainly do so. But that being said, I talk to cleaning clients like yourselves multiple times every single day. Sorry, sorry, we're a hard lot, right? Yeah, in these small business owners, they can be difficult sometimes and it's not that they're difficult. It's like they feel the pressure within themselves because growing a business isn't easy. And especially if you're in growth stage when you're barely getting by with the profits you have and you're on the cusp of almost to the point where it's like, yes, I made it and it's difficult. And I understand the pain. I went through it myself with a business of two. So, I get it, it's difficult. But a lot of times the people that don't stick the path are the ones that don't succeed. So, yeah, it's not too bad dealing with the cleaning industry. I'll tell you what, dealing with lawyers are way worse. Oh my gosh, it all really started. I've only really had two clients in the history of time that I have been working with clients that I was like, you know what? This person's crazy, a little bit crazy. Both attorneys. No doubt. Yeah, I mean, yeah. I rather do alcoholics. I can't think of anybody that I wouldn't rather work with than attorneys. I'm like, man, they're full. All right, what am I getting here? I'm getting some comments on my phone. Why am I getting comments on my phone? I thought there were some comments on the phone. I mean, if your podcast is connected to your phone, you might get automated notifications. From people that are commenting here. They're commenting on myself. That's very odd. I haven't seen that happen before. All right, well, we're gonna. Maybe it's a new feature on the software. Yeah. Turned my phone around. Casey, good to see you. Hi, I'm Xander. I'm happy to see everybody. Okay, so, Maria, I don't even know if I talked to you about the topic. Did I? No. Actually, I don't know what we're talking about. I just assumed we're talking with Dan and Dan is so interesting and he'll just talk and we'll learn and it's like a friendly coffee talk conversation. Before we get into it. So I'm gonna tell you what the title is. But then before we get into it, we do have to do the Isochis for today. So the topic is generating online leads and sales team customer service strategies. Maria, how happy are you? I created that title, by the way. Good title. I thought it would be a very attracting title. It's like a good call to action for everybody. It's so good, I love it. Yeah, so right up our alley too. And I'll let Maria talk a little bit about why that's right up our alley in a little bit. Hey, Don. Oh, she was just saying that she's definitely growth phase and money is tight. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Keep at it. Don, it'll be fine. You know, just stay the course. Oh, that was sweet. That was sweet. Let's see. Yeah. Oh, and I just realized I can even get you guys over there. Don's excited, great topic. It's perfect. It's timely for her as well. Good. Alrighty, so Isochis for today, y'all. I has to say residential for those of you that don't know, they are having a regional event. I got a look at my calendar over here. What day is that? The 21st of August. August 21st. And if you haven't registered for that, go check it out. I think it's 100 bucks. I think it's originally $150. There's a $100, I mean a $50 discount. It might have ended, but even at 150 bucks. Come on now. And I'll just tell you this, if you want to go and that $50 is like, uh, holding you up. First 10 people that say that I'll pay the 50 bucks for you. You just reach out to me and I'll fork it over for you. The more people we can have there, the better for the industry. Huge believer in making sure that our industry gets professionalized in a bigger, better way. Even you, we're saying, yeah, oh no, no, no, you're not hard, but small businesses, you know, and especially in our situation where we're so fractured, you know, things are just different. We just don't operate to the level that we could if we were in a more professional, if we were more professionalized as an industry, not the individuals, not seeing the individuals that we ourselves are not professionals. I'm just saying that our industry is not a professionalized industry. No, it's not. Yeah. Okay, so Dawn is saying, yes, three events. So this first two minutes, I always want to talk about ISSA Residential first and then we'll move on from that is that Made Central is also doing an event two days directly after the ISSA event. Made Central Academy Live, you go there, learn about how Made Central works, get all of the details figured out, understand how to get all of your reports, how to use it, how to, if you can think about it, you're going to, I just love that cup, so cute. Oh yeah, thank you. Yeah, I have a collection of cups when I talk to meetings and clients, so. My husband keeps telling me that I need to get a little, like a logo for the bottom of my cups because I drink on everyone and he's like, you need to have a, I don't know if I'm gonna be able to do that. Marketing, right? Yep, gonna see it, cute. And then after the Made Central event, you can stay for another two days and do my event, which is lead and manage by the numbers. You're gonna be learning a lot about your numbers in the Made Central event. If you're going to that, you might wanna stay for the next two days and it's great to know all the numbers, great to understand how all this stuff works, but how are you going to push those numbers down through your company and make it so that you're actually running your company using these numbers? And that means it's about more than just you. Your people are going to have to use the numbers as well and they're gonna have to understand how everything's working and why we do the things that we do. So that is our quick is-a-kiss today. Ooh, I will put a link in the chat, is it the chat or I guess the comments. But while I'm getting that link together, I'm gonna have y'all kind of get started, Dan, and chat a little bit about your topic. You came up with it, so I'm thinking you feel passionate about it. Yeah, I'm very passionate about this topic. You know, generating leads and the sales team customer service basically goes hand in hand in a lot of ways, but a lot of people does one thing better than the other or doesn't really understand the other thing. Generating leads right now is a very difficult thing for clients. Google's algorithm, if we talk about online specifically, I can certainly talk about outbound leads too, but when we talk about inbound leads, specifically on lines type of stuff, there's so many things to look at nowadays. You got Google local service ads, you got Google ads, you got ads in the Google Maps area, you got SEO in the Google Maps area, you got organic SEO below that, you got Yelp, you got Care, you got Thumbtack, you got just a huge mess of things. And it's confusing. It really, really is confusing where to go, where to start off, what you think will work. You got everybody telling you, you're getting marketing emails saying that you gotta do this, you gotta do that. You probably get scary emails being like, oh, your website's awful, your website's not ranking, and those are all automated messages out there, everybody. Five a day, five a day. I get text messages, I get everything. It's great. I'm even on the no spam list and I still get spammed every single hour. Thank you, right? Yeah. And, you know, don't listen to everything out there. You know, trusting your instinct, trusting your gut is what I would say to do first. I would also say, just utilize your own case study as yourself or even ask your family or friends. If somebody needed to, if you say you're an accountant and you come home from work, you have kids, your house is a fricking mess. And you're just like, I don't wanna clean the home. And I'm gonna hire somebody to do this, which probably happens quite a bit. And what's that behavior gonna be like if that was you? What's the first thing you're gonna do, right? And if I were to ask Maria, Maria, what's the first thing you're gonna do? If that happened. Go to Google. Go to Google. Right? All right, so that's good. So let's take it a step further. So once you go to Google, Maria, what's the second thing you're gonna do? So my background, the first thing I'll do is go to all the reviews. I go to the most top rated, the, actually, I just did this today. Actually, the company has the most reviews. Okay, so in essence, to take that even a step further, you're gonna skip past the ads, correct? Correct. Because the reviews are below the ads. All right, so think about that. So maybe ads isn't the first thing you should go for because it's not gonna be the first thing you would do as a customer, you won't click on the ads first. And that's a very common thing. If you think about it, from a very, most people that are very affluent, and this isn't to make fun of anybody out there, but most people that are very affluent will do the research behind the company of who they want to have come inside their house and into their personal space. They're not, the people that are usually desperate and need something right now, those wonderful same day cleaning companies, which I know all you guys like out there, but those people are the ones that are gonna be clicking on the ads and they're gonna be calling, be like, can you come out and clean my place today? And a lot of times in certain operations, especially if you're already established, you don't have the capacity or the bandwidth or that's not really what you do. So lots of times ads can be like that. And in the modern day, if you think about it right now with ads, I'm talking specifically just to Google local service ads and just get Google AdWords up top. Right now leads are difficult in the summertime to come by. We just mentioned that in the very beginning, it's just normal, use your own practices. People aren't home, they're with their families, kids are still out of school, they're going back to school soon. Some are just, I think this week, but at the same time, you're not thinking about doing things at your home right now. And COVID also kind of helped accelerate the processes in the last recent years where people wanna go out and do more experiences, which even hurts this industry a little bit more, but that's okay. This is usually an industry trend. Before COVID, this time of the year was the slower time of the year for the cleaning industry. So that seems like a decades ago by now, but a lot of people forgot that. They expected that same acceleration of growth that they had in COVID years as they continue that path. And unfortunately, that's just not the case, but we went back to almost, I don't wanna say a norm, we're not quite there, but I would say this is the trend. So what do you do to combat that? You have to really be smart about where you put your money. And what Google does, when times when they know that leads are harder to come by, which they do for the industries, the cost per click of the ads themselves actually get higher. So not only our ads still not as effective, they also cost more and they also give you less opportunity to go to your website. So going more off of what Maria said, she's gonna go down to the local search, which is the maps area. That's where you're gonna get a bunch of the reviews. Sometimes you might click more than those three that are right there to see if there's other companies that fit what you're looking for. But that's a good point. To be able to rank in the GMB is a very difficult topic in the modern day. So everybody's like, oh, so yeah, I guess that's true. That's what I do. So how do I get into the area of the three pack more often? Well, that's a great question. It's one of the most difficult things to answer right now for the clients out there. Most clients aren't gonna like this answer, but this is the truth. To be able to rank in the modern day in the GMB map pack, which is the three spots right below the map there. Hopefully everybody knows what that is now. You have to have a real office space to start. And everybody's like, oh, that's so stupid. I roll their eyes, they're like, I can't believe it. I don't need a real office space to run my company. I run it from my home. There's no reason to have a real office space, which is a lot of cleaning companies start off that way. Obviously a lot of established cleaning companies now have actual offices. But listen, this is the way Google's, ever since August of last year, they've really cracked down on people that have gained the system and ruined it for everybody else. For instance, the people that haven't, they don't wanna rank anymore residential addresses. Peel boxes, virtual addresses. Shared office space is even like we work in Regis. Don't fly anymore. Now you'll still see people ranking for those things right now. But more often every single week, more and more accounts are getting suspended. And suspensions aren't really necessarily a bad thing. Google's just asking for what's called a re-verification to make sure that your business is legitimate. So they'll ask you to do, they don't do postcards that much anymore. They do what's called video verifications. So you'll actually have to take your phone from the parking lot, sign into the Google app because it doesn't work on the browser, but sign into the Google app, start your video verification process, actually walk from the parking lot to your office to prove that this is where employees go have signage on the door. And they might even go a step further and ask you to submit bills from that month, from that office space in that address, take other pictures, you know, and so on and so forth. And it can be a lengthy process. It can be like one to two months now. Yeah. And it's stressful because like all of a sudden you're like, oh, wait a minute, where's my Google listing and where's my four or 500 reviews or 200 reviews? They're gone and it's stressful. It is stressful. It's stressful thinking that, you know, all those years of work that you've put into building your Google listing is just gone. So not a fun time in between. Yeah. And you're not gonna technically lose those reviews if like you can literally have a virtual office right now and then maybe you got suspended and you might have a hundred reviews on there. You can go out and get a real office space and all those reviews can be transferred just fine. But the problem is the psychological aspect of I have to spend money to have an office that I'm not even gonna use. But then I wouldn't say, hey, again, that my theme is gonna be don't become your own worst enemy here. Think about the positive impacts of this. So let's say you do get a real office space and you spend, I don't know, a thousand a month, 500 a month, whatever it is in your city, everybody's different. And will you think you'll make more money than a $500 to $1,000 a month off the lead generation you get from being ranked in the maps? Oh yeah, way, way more. I mean, what's the value? I mean, we're all here to target reoccurring clientele, right? The average reoccurring clientele is around 18 months, we'll say. So if you take the average reoccurring clientele for around 18 months, you're looking at a profit or you're looking at a overall revenue of somewhere around $3,000 to $5,000, depending on what you charge. And the profits of that should be around 20 to 35% for the, depending on your operations. So if you really break it down, you're making, you're doing quite well when it comes to that. And that's just one client. That's just one lead. Yeah. So- Hopefully you have at least that, otherwise you've got bigger issues. All right, real quick- Hey, hey, Jamie. Yeah, and I also have a question from Dawn. Oh, good, you did see Jamie. All right, so Dawn's got a question for you here, Dan. Yes, Dawn says, are you saying if you have a remote office that Google will cancel my account and could lose my reviews? No, I'm saying they could suspend your account. Now, suspensions do sound scary, but all the suspensions means is again, they want to re-verify your account. And then you help, again, you'll have to go out and get a real office space because they won't verify you if it's a fake office. So, unfortunately. And then- So if you were approved last year, what are the chances that they're gonna come back on her and make her re-verify? What I would say, there's two things to talk about with this. What I would say is just keep the path, don't change anything for right now is one option. When it does happen, just be mentally prepared to go out and find an office. A good start resource for that is Craigslist, looking for mom and pop shops that are very affordable, okay? The other caveat to this though is Google actually understands your office is a virtual office space. And if you hide your address in Google, which a lot of people do because it might be a residential or it might not be a real address, Google will actually not favor you in the rankings either in search anymore. So you're gonna have troubles ranking regardless of if your office is still verified and it's not a real office space. So it's kind of unfortunate, but eventually, Dawn, you will have to go down the path to get a real office space. Again, you can go find the most affordable one you can to start off with. But at the end of the day, it will have a positive impact on not only your rankings, but just knowing that that's what you need to do in the future. It's not gonna get any easier with Google. We've all, whatever agencies or people that anybody's using out there, you've all seen it's become a lot more difficult to rank and maintain those rankings. And it's not gonna get any easier, but especially if you don't follow the rules, I would say half our clientele doesn't wanna follow the rules or are very, very resistant against them. Just because they see their competitors do the same thing that they're doing, and they're so they're like, why would I wanna do different than what my competitors are doing? They're doing fine, why can't I do fine? But when it comes to a good digital marketing person, you need to not look at the past and the present. You need to understand what's gonna happen in the future. With AI happening, with all these very, very great topics that we could talk about right now. So Dawn, I would just say to this, be prepared, if you're not monetarily prepared yet, that's okay. You can stay the course until you're monetarily prepared. Once you do have the extra money to go get an office space, I would do it as soon as you can. And I would do it the right way. And it's not only getting an office space, you're gonna have to also get what's called a DBA, which is a doing business ads. It's a legal document you get to showcase to Google that you can do business as your business name or slightly different than your business name. So a lot of times, Jamie just said hello on here, Jamie Reader, right? She's Dustin Mopp. She's one of our clients. She has a couple of office spaces. We just got her another office in a different location. So like for instance, she'll be Dustin Mopp of Raleigh, for instance. And that's not her legal name. So that's why she has to get a DBA that says called Dustin Mopp of Raleigh or Dustin Mopp cleaning of Raleigh would be even better because you're really showcasing your brand as a cleaning brand. And also you're located in one area. I'm incorporated with a DBA. That's great. You can get as many DBAs as you want, Don. You can get 100 DBAs for your incorporation, right? We're an S corp, for instance, but we can have 50 different DBAs with 50 different types of names that are similar to our name. But what Google wants to see, if you change your name at all away from your incorporation name, they want you to have a DBA in the GMB. And that essentially just means, can I share my screen? Yeah. Oh, yes. Yeah. Boom, there we go. Let's have some fun here. It's always easier seeing it from a more visual standpoint. So let's do a share here. It's less fun for the people that are listening on a podcast. Yeah. Ha ha ha ha ha, I should have come live, y'all. Yeah, so let's use a city. Let's do Olympia, Washington. All right, let's see how well you're doing, Dan. All right, all right. Let's see, let's see, let's see. I'm not in Washington, so I'm going to do near me because I'm not logged into a VPN. For out there, for everybody, if you want to see your real rankings, make sure you log into a VPN to see your real rankings, okay? So I'm just going to do house cleaning near me, which I'm in Seattle, Washington actually, just so everybody knows. I don't want to log into my VPN right now because I don't know if that will really work well with this. So I'll just do house cleaning near me. You're not wearing yet, just so you know, too, Dan. Oh, I'm not. No, not yet. It's just I'm sharing there, Liz. Let me go, let me, let me do a little career. Give me one quick second. Right away. Let's see. How you'll know you're sharing is you won't be able to see us anymore. We'll be able to, but you won't be able to. It's a stream yard issue. Okay, let's see this, present. And I just do share screen, my assumption is, correct? Yeah. Yeah. And then share screen. And I'm going to do my entire screen. I'm going to click it and I'm going to click share. And can everybody see Google here? Yeah. Yeah. You might have to pick a certain screen or a tab. Oh, interesting. It's a little bit different. There are different options. Yeah. Share screen, share screen. Okay, I'm going to share my window. Okay. There we go. There we go. Okay. So let's do house cleaning. Since I'm in Seattle, I'm going to pick on Seattle a little bit. Seattle, Washington. All right, so here's the ads, of course. But you're going to notice, if you take a look right here, you got three people that are ranking right here. I actually live right here near the Woodland Zoo. So that's why Google picks up my location right here. And take this kind of in consideration of everybody else that's out there in the world that is looking for services for yours. This is how Google will look at things. So look at, this is in Seattle right here. Seattle's actually south of this location by about 10 minutes. But Google's picking up my location from my computer. And that's why logging in the VPNs and putting your zip code in is always going to be the best way to really see your true rankings. So if you take a look right here, this is just my location. Even though I'm searching in Seattle. Because if I blow this map out just a little bit, just to put it in perspective, you'll see Seattle's actually located downtown right here. But it's picking up. But it picked up my location right there. And that's just because of where I'm looking for, and I'm looking from my house right now. So it's like, I'm looking for a cleaning company, essentially. But if you take a look, if you go down to the ads, my point is, but my DBA, Molly made, Molly made, we all know Molly made out there, right? But Molly made, they're in corporation with Molly made, or maybe Molly maids LLC, or now Molly maids corporation, whatever it is. But they're not Molly maids of Northwest Seattle. So they get a DBA that's essentially just called Molly maids of Northwest Seattle, just so they can change their name. And there's just right here. This is the only place that it changed. It doesn't change for tax purposes. Nothing else changes. Just the DBA, we submit a DBA actually into Google. So you can legally be called that name and search. And the advantage of that is, is you'll see right here, there's no secret why these three companies are ranking right here. One has Seattle in their name. I searched with the keyword Seattle. One has Seattle and cleaning in their name, both also in the keywords I searched. And Molly made has made and Seattle in their name, which can also be keywords to search. So if you think about it in that perspective, that's the importance. That's the difference between having a DBA and being incorporated, okay? So that's kind of what we're talking about there. So that's from an online lead standpoint, you need to be focused on A, doing it accurate for your brand when it comes to the GMB for Google My Business, having real office spaces, getting the DBAs. And then there's also the, and that's just the administration standpoint. Then there's actually ranking it and it's how to rank it in search. Just to hold, we can do a million of these things and it'll take me a while to tell you how to rank right here. But that's just to set the bar with Google that you're legitimate, that you're a real brand, you're looking to rank for your industry. Then it's the process of doing certain types of work with your onsite SEO and citation and directory building and reviews guys, reviews are so important. Maria mentioned that. Reviews are becoming more and more of a signal to Google on ranking in here. And it's not about the amount of reviews, it's about what we call review velocity. It's the consistency of the reviews you get. If you get a couple reviews every week, Google likes to see that in a hundred reviews one week and then no reviews for 10 months. Google won't like that. It's the same thing when it comes to Google. No, let it see. Yeah, it's the same thing when we come talk about back linking when you probably hear that word quite a bit. You never wanna get like a hundred backlinks in one month and then get none the rest of the months. You want consistency each and every month when it comes to Google because that's really what they're looking for whether you deserve to be ranked in search or not. So that's the GMB. That's a good place to start when it comes to focusing your attention on where is the most important. The caveat to focusing your attention on here is yes, this is the number one lead generator online on the first page of search, everybody. Not this, not this, not Yelp, not down here, it's rate here, okay? And the only caveat to this is it takes time and a lot of you might not have time, might not wanna wait six months to a year to be able to rank here but the problem is you have to. If you push it too fast, you'll get penalized by Google and then you'll be in all sorts of trouble. If you go too slow, then you just go too slow and it takes forever and you spend so much money and it's just slow. So there's a very equal balance and an expectation that everybody needs to understand when it comes to rank here. Nobody can rank here in three months unless you're in a very rural area and you aren't a part of a major or a small city. If you're in a very rural area with no competition then sure, you could probably rank there much quicker. But there's three cleaning companies where you are, you're probably gonna be there. 100%, right? So just keep that in mind when it comes to this. I have a question for you, Dan. Sure. So we're talking about how if you don't have an actual physical location that you can get suspended, does Google tell you about that before they suspend you? They do not. Unfortunately. I didn't think so. Yeah, when it comes to lots of things, one of my topics I was gonna do with you guys was I was gonna talk about malware and how to protect against malware on your websites was one of the topics. I thought this was more vital, but that's another thing. Like you get no notification if your website's been hacked. You might, once it's been hacked, but it's already been hacked. So it doesn't matter. Same thing with Google. Like you don't get, you'll automatically just be suspended. And... Do they send you an email as well? They could send you a notification depending on how your notifications are set up. But lots of times you might just realize that the leads are slow and you're like, you're wondering why? And then when you research, you're gonna be like, oh, I'm not ranking anymore. Why is that? And then you're gonna log into your Google My Business page and you're gonna see that your thing is suspended and it's probably gonna fire you up. It's probably, you're probably gonna get mad at your agency. You're probably gonna jump to conclusions just like everybody does. But just, but the case of the matter is it's not technically, it's only your agency's fault if they didn't set that expectation with you at the beginning that you could be suspended because of the office. That's the fault, right? If you understood that you could be suspended, you know what's coming. Now, Dawn, you're one of those situations right now that was asking questions. You could eventually get suspended and this is gonna be the reason why. And it's not gonna get any easier, guys. It's not, Google's not gonna be looser on the rules. Google's under a lot of criticism from countries with security issues and this and that and they're gonna tighten the strings. And this is them tightening the strings so people can't game the system with fake office spaces and things like that. So, because I'm sure you guys, back in the day you would probably realize you used to have competitors that would have in one city like seven, eight different locations all around the city that were like peel boxes and they got them ranked all over the place and you know, they weren't real offices. They're just trying to game the system and that's what's going on. Dawn's got a question for you here. Sure. Let me, I'll stop sharing for a second. Let me see. Are you suggesting to get a DBA for each of the cities you clean and that includes your company name with the cities you work in, that's accurate, yes. And the Seattle cleaning companies you are showing so get one for each city. Yeah, so if, I don't know, you can use a lot of different examples of it. There's a lot of cities out there and there's a lot of cities that are very spread out. Like you can talk about like Los Angeles, for example. There's downtown Los Angeles where people will search LA. There's Hollywood. There's Beverly Hills. There's Santa Monica. There's in 50 other areas in there and it's a huge area, but you can only rank really specifically at each compartment of area right there. So yes, you would need to get, if you have multiple locations, I would highly suggest, I don't know what your name of your business is Dawn, but I would say, I would highly suggest that you name your business in DBAs at each area where you have real office spaces. And Dan, so once we go out and we get our DBAs for the cities and the areas, can we just open up our Google Places and just, I'm sure there's gonna be a place within our account that we can just upload that paperwork? Yeah, there are ways to submit the DBAs into Google and then you can change the name on your own and search showing that you did it legally and everything should be okay. Now Google might, again, anytime when you make changes to your name or your profile in regards to that, they could ask for a re-verification. So you might have to go through the re-verification process again. And keep in mind, there's not an individual looking at these. And if it was an actual human being looking at this stuff, they could be like, oh yeah, this is good, unsuspent. These are robots. These are algorithmic things that take time. So unfortunately, that's why it takes a little bit more time. We've seen it anywhere from three weeks to two months to get verified by doing the correct steps of an office space. So just, it's a long time now. Back in the day, they sent the postcard in a few days and you put the postcard number in and done. You know, but that's, those are the good old days. And that's really a long time if you were just kind of waiting, thinking, oh, I'm just gonna wait until Google catches me. I don't know, is that such a great strategy because you're gonna be suspended for how long? Yeah, and you're gonna, you'll eventually have to go through the process anyways. And again, the thing that a lot of people miss out is because of where your office is set up, if it's a residential and you hide your address, you're still not gonna rank well in search or as well as you could. So just keep that all in mind, everybody out there. And then when you talk about other leads, obviously the more sophisticated people that are usually research bound. So they'll research kind of like what Marina was saying. She'll look at the reviews. Once she looks at the reviews though, what are you gonna do? You see something you like and then what do you do after that, Maria? You pick up the phone and you call them. Do you call them from the actual map location or do you go to the website first? Oh, you're right. I go to the website and check out the website, very good. But it could be either or. A lot of people might just call from the GMB. So a lot of times when you say that my website traffic is down or I'm not getting as many calls from my website anymore or things like that, that's not necessarily a bad thing. That just means maybe you're getting more calls from your Google local location. That might be because people don't need to go to your website as much anymore because there's so much information online to find out. But yes, a lot of people still will go to the website. And when they go to the website, as long as you're not off putting on your website, they've obviously have intent now because they checked out your reviews and then they went to your website. So there's no reason to convince them anymore. The problem I see a lot of times is people make their website overly robust with tons of the navigation or anything like that. Is there a website out there of anybody listening that I can take a look at as an example, please post it in here as a comment and we'll go over it real quickly. So feel free to do that and I'll kind of show you what I mean. But when you go to a website in the modern age, I'm gonna use, and I'll share my screen until if I hear from anybody, I am going to pick on Jamie Reader a little bit. And I'm not gonna pick, I'm gonna pick on her in a really good way. All right. So. I'm sure she won't complain about that. Yeah, so Dustin Mopp. So before Jamie's website, it's very great. She's got very authentic images. They're very fun to look at. They create an impression right away when you go to your website. Probably when you went to this website, it made you smile a little bit. And that's what websites need to do. They need to psychologically market you as well. A lot of people don't talk about psychological marketing. Psychological marketing is if it creates an emotion by going, whether it's a good, bad, or whatever emotion by going to your website, you captured their attention by doing that. If it creates no emotion at all, no attention's been captured. So Jamie has a great website with good fun images right here and things along those lines. Now, I want to showcase this to you, right? Jamie before used to have a huge navigation right here. She used to list off her locations, her careers, her blog, you know, her contact us page, her about us page, and those are all distractions, guys. Oh yeah. Because of why. We just came to the conclusion that someone has intent from your website from looking at your reviews. So don't distract them away from the point. The point is now they want information, they want to see how much you guys cost, right? That's the next steps in their process. So if you look at Jamie's website, clear call to actions, two phone numbers for the area she's in, get a quote or just, you know, instead of going to any other page, let's just fill out this form right here and get a free quote right away. And if somebody is wanting to find more information, they can just click this accordion menu and look it. They can discover all those distractions right there that they want to find. Because if someone really wants to find your blog or your reviews or your about us page, they'll search for it. They're gonna find it, yeah. And you can see it, they're all right there ready to go. So her website showcases the awards right here on the quote. And these are, these are website changes that we assisted her with, but she also approved and it was very understanding why the reasoning was behind it. So, and then honestly, you get to hear. Once you scroll away from above the fold right here, 50% of all of your audiences never make it to this point. 50% of all your audiences never make it to another page on your website. That's why the average bounce rates are 50 to 60% out there. Dan, just, this is one of the things I learned from you. And I'm like, oh my gosh, in all my years of knowing this, I can't believe I didn't know what this means. And like the implications for me are huge. Do you mind the above the fold concept? Do you mind kind of explaining that a little bit? Yeah, the above the fold is simply, you land on a website like this, right? So if I'll just refresh this page, you land on a website like this. And I don't know where form, there it goes. Land on the website like this. And this is the above the fold area. This is your prime real estate, everybody. Prime real estate. The minute you have to scroll your fold. The minute you force all those lazy users out there to scroll, because honestly, that's how people are. They want information fast. And you need to provide it fast without distraction. So the minute you force them to scroll on their phone or on their desktop device, that's 50% of your audience does not do that. 50% of your audience also doesn't click to another internal page on your website. They only stay on the landing page they landed on. So that's why this is very important. Again, there's nothing special besides her beautiful image in the background. There's nothing more special about this. It's very simple. And that's what most people are kind of gearing towards is more simplistic websites. I see a lot of things people get wrong, like a lot of people start with stock photography. I would also encourage not having stock photography, even if that means taking your iPhone or your Android out there and just taking a picture of some of your staff doing cleaning, raw imagery is real imagery. People appreciate that. People really see the difference between fake images and real images. And if you look more localized to your community, I'm gonna give my money to my more localized community instead of this big franchise over here. So keep that in mind. So good question, Maria. Any other questions from you too? I did have one and now I forgot what it was. I really love the idea of just having the contact. Right here, I feel like this page is making me do the thing that's gonna give me what I want. I wouldn't even need to school. Why would I school? Exactly. And you made it very easy with, you know, and this is gonna be easy. But what about the people, Dan, that are like they never have enough information? They're gonna go look for it, right? They will go look for it. And... What's not been never does anything on the first page. He has to look at all the pages, read all the things, look at all the reviews. Yeah, his mind is a read, but those people are ingrained to search. So they're gonna find it. They're gonna look in here. They might scroll down the page. They might be like, oh, deep cleaning services. That's what I need. Then they'll click this button and they'll go to reading about the services on here and things along those lines. I love the real people. Yeah, real people. Everybody loves the real people. This was just a fake, we've always seen the fake photographs of the happy family with the dog on the clean couch in the living room that everybody has a stock photography up there. But this is real. This is obviously a part of the community. These are real people. You get to see the faces. For a lot of people, COVID definitely accelerated this. They're not comfortable with strangers coming into their home. How can you make that comfortable? By showing the faces that are gonna be coming into your home. There's nothing better than doing that, right? So that makes you feel a lot more comfortable as well. But yes, to answer your question, Jamie, people will search for things but as long as you have your call to actions on every page that they search, right there, you're gonna be good. You can go to your reviews. There's your call to actions. They're right there. You can see the more reviews, more call to actions near the bottom of the page. Always make it easy when going on the website to navigate through and to make it easy to convert. Don't be invasive. Don't be like, contact us now. Right now we're the best. This and that. Nobody likes to toot their own horn in the modern day and nobody likes to see you toot your own horn. And in fact, I would say that reviews like this are fine to have on the website, but nobody believes them because you put them on your website, you know. I don't know, I would believe these because she's got a four star up there. Oh yeah, I mean, you better believe it. But the person that was gonna believe it, it might be more of the Maria who's already seen all her wonderful reviews on Google and that's why she came through her website in the first place. Yeah. So, and this is a good segue to- And this is a good- And I could definitely talk about more of the online stuff. The next most important just before I segue into the customer service aspect of the things is below the map section is the other best area to convert. It's getting more and more difficult to rank in the organic first page, but if you guys haven't noticed now, so like if I search house cleaning, the search house cleaning near me again or Seattle, notice when you scroll, before you used to have to click when you got to the bottom of page one, you used to have to click to page two. Yeah. Now you realize it's just a continual scroll, like this, going and going and going. I didn't even notice that. And there's, if you look on the stats online now, being on page two is actually converting a lot more than it ever has. So even if your rankings are on page two, you're probably gonna get more lead generations than it was when they made this change a few months back. So don't be discouraged on page two all the time. Of course, page one's always the goal, but even page one. Well, what's page two now because everything is page one? Yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly. So what is page two? So every 10 positions is a page. So one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, and then you see right here, there's the sponsored results, which is basically the separation between page one and now page two, which is more sponsored results and now it's more. So, and then FAQ is another very important thing that I could beat this topic on, but this will become important, not just because it ranks on the first page of search, but also AI. AI is never gonna really, your chat, GPT or Bard when Google has it, you're never gonna be able to be like, hey, hey Google, what's the best cleaner in my area? They're never gonna be like, oh, Dustin Mop. I'm sure that Jamie would love that, but they're never gonna say that. They're gonna give you a list of everybody that's on the first page of the maps essentially, and they're gonna be like this person, this person, this person, so you're gonna have to still distinguish it on your own. But when it comes to like, what's the best steps for spring cleaning in Seattle, Washington? If you wrote an article about that, they'll say, well, according to Dustin Mop cleaners of Raleigh, North Carolina, they say that the best five steps are this, this, this and that. So that's why FAQs can become more important in our future. And a lot of times people write, I mean, you can see right here, I just clicked on this FAQ, and it's just a blog article by Divine Mates, which is a localized cleaning company right here. They got a spot on the first page just because they wrote an FAQ. Yeah, that's nice. So those things are really nice. So yes, being ranked below here is also very important. Obviously you're gonna compete against people like Yelp and Care and Thumbtack, which are gonna be pretty much impossible to outrank most of the time just because they're just massive companies, but that's okay. Just make sure you're doing your best on those platforms as well. But there is an order, a hierarchy of where to focus and where not to focus your budgets and your time. And that kind of, yeah, go ahead. Sorry, really quick question. So you talked about the importance of FAQs. Are blogs still relevant? Is that still a thing for Google? They are, but a lot of times people get blog topics wrong. They always just create generalized blog topics, okay? Like top five clings to do in spring cleaning. But what did I say? I said top five things to prepare for in Seattle, Washington for spring cleaning. They got a lot more specific to the areas. A lot of times there's a lot of marketing firms that'll write blogs and they're so happy about writing blogs because they get ranked all across the nation for generalized topics. And then they get a lot more traffic to the website. But, you know, I mean, Liz, would traffic coming from Michigan help you out? No, no, traffic from Michigan doesn't help you out. So why would you want to rank a blog in Michigan or any other parts except for your generalized area? But of course, since you write all of my blogs that would never happen, right, Dan? Yeah, yeah, it is good. So blogs are good for three reasons, guys. So there's three reasons to write blogs. One is there's two, the first two are on-site SEO things. What Google wants to see is they want to see your website grow in size. And the easiest way to do that is to write a blog. So that's one on-site tick. So even if the topics aren't generalized to just Olympia for you, Liz, in acceptance, you want to see your website continually grow in size. Another thing that Google wants to see is you every single month or multiple times a month updating your website, which shows to Google that you're taking care of your website to give a better user experience. And I haven't even talked about user experience, but that's extremely important. But so it shows Google that your website's growing in size. It shows Google that your website is continually being updated. And then there's the third thing that's good for is you can rank for what we call long-tail keywords. Long-tail keywords doesn't really get a lot of traffic. Maybe 10 to 50 searches a month. But if you rank for 50 keywords that are long-tail that get 20 volume a month, that's a lot of traffic coming to your website. Never, and this is an issue I have with all my cleaning clients. They always just want to rank for house cleaning their city, house cleaning near me, cleaning services. And that's all their attention span focuses on. Which is fine, I understand. We all want you to rank there as well. The problem is long-tail keywords are higher converting keywords. So you don't want to discount those keywords. If someone specifically searches for, I'm looking for a deep clean move in and out cleaning service in my area or in Seattle, Washington, they're specifically really need something of value right now. So they're wanting to buy now. They have more intent is what we call it. So never discount long-tail keywords, but never lose track of your higher volume keywords either, okay? Which this segues into a little bit of customer service. I'm glad, just we only got eight minutes. I know, I have to fire all this off. Even though this is really where I want to discuss today a little bit more and I'll really try to jump into it as quickly as possible. And I'll stop sharing. I got it off. Yeah, so you get leads, all right? Great. Great. Yeah. And every client tells me, oh, we do great with them. We're good with customer service. And then I test them out. They don't know we test them out, but we do test them out sometimes. I just tested out individual out of Chicago, Illinois of helping hands the other day, right? And they do a wonderful, wonderful job just to be clear about that. But nobody does a perfect job. And I'll tell you what, when I was in the five diamond resort corporation world, we used to get tested on a weekly basis by customers. And if we didn't answer the phone call and under two rings, we would get written up. If we got written up twice, we would either get suspended or fired. And that's even if the other phone is ringing. So I'll give you an example. If you're not answering the phone like this, good afternoon, this is Daniel Hertz speaking from Dustin Mop Services, how may I assist you? If you're not answering it exactly like that, you're not providing a good customer service. Sometimes people just say good morning, Dustin Mop, or they'll say good morning, or they'll say Dustin Mop or something like that. But your first impression of your brand is first your website and your stuff that you have online from that lead. And second is the way you answer your phone. How warm and fuzzy does it make you feel when someone says good morning, this is Dan speaking from Dustin Mop, how may I assist you today? Or how may I be of service today? Or how may we help you clean today? Something funky like that works as well. But you're setting the tone being like, wow, this company is professional, right? And you answered that phone in under two rings. Whoa. I went to voicemail in the other three companies I called. I can't tell you how many clients we have gotten because we answered their call first or we answered it faster than everybody else. I can't tell you how important that is to people out there. That's always been a thing too in our industry, right? Everybody's listening to that. So simple. How is it still? And they're like, well, sometimes I can't because I'm on the line with somebody and the phone's ringing and I just can't answer that phone. That's an excuse, everybody. What you do is you just say, may I place you on a brief hold? And then you place them on a brief hold and you're like, good morning. This is Daniel from Dustin Mop. How may I assist you today? Or no, you say, good morning. This is Daniel Her from Dustin Mop. May I place you on a brief hold? And you place that person on the hold, then you go back to the phone call that you were on. And you learn that skill. It sounds maybe difficult at first, but I was fluid. I used to do it a hundred times a day in my job and I got real good at it. And anybody out there can get good at that. So if you're not doing that from the very beginning, your customer service isn't great. Number two, the follow-up process. You might get a lead today that, now maybe they just weren't ready for your prices today. What do you do with that lead in the future? So you just put it in some, you just, that's it. Most people, that's it. Some people might throw into an email marketing campaign. Some people might go the extra mile and maybe reach, when times of that are slower leads like we're having right now during this month, they might go back to the leads they had in June and give them a quick call. It'd be like, hey, we talked for your cleaning services a month ago and you weren't ready then. I'm just checking back in with you to see if you're ready now. I mean, does anybody do that? Probably not. Yeah, I mean, the follow-up process is at least write them an email, at least maybe send them an SMS text message. Until that person says, no, stop bothering me, you haven't done your job on the follow-up process. And that's as easy as it could be. If they get upset that you keep bothering them, they were never gonna be a client or a customer of yours in the first place. So don't be afraid to continually talk to people out there on your follow-up process. You should be emailing them in an email marketing campaign every two weeks, every week out there. If you guys aren't doing that and if your follow-up processes aren't good, I get a lot of complaints sometimes throughout the years. Hey, our leads are down, what's going on? And then we talk about the leads and we see that the rankings are still the exact same as when the leads were good. So then I have to talk to those people and be like, why is this as well? If the demand is not in the marketplace, the search isn't in the marketplace, therefore you're not gonna get as many online leads. Pretty common sense, right? But so then I asked them, what are you doing besides relying on your online lead sources right now? You guys have gotten 1,000 leads over the year. What are you doing with those? Are you doing email marketing? They're like, no. Are you reaching back out to them? No. Are you trying to call them back? We're working on it. You know, like it's an excuse after, excuse, after excuse. You don't want to work out time. Yes, but we're busy. We're busy again, we don't have all those customers. The best piece of advice I can give everybody out there is you guys are not cleaning companies. You're a lead generation company. If you start thinking of yourself as lead generation companies, you will be a highly successful company. If you wake up and the first thing you do is not focus on your cleaners, where they need to go, your training. If you focus on what can I do to improve my leads today for just 30 minutes out of your day, every single day for the next month or two, you will see a drastic change in your approach and business and you will feel the best problem in the world is I have too much business. I need to hire, I need to hire more employees, right? That's the best feeling ever. Even though it's stressful because you can't take care of everybody and you have to find good quality staff and train them and get them up to speed really quickly. I get it. We've all been there. That's a whole other problem. It's a whole other problem, but that's a good problem. And a better one to solve too. Yeah, you have people wanting to throw money at you right now. That's the important part. To start waking up in the morning and start thinking about the way you handle your lead generation. Whether it's going out and asking for one more review to looking at the next email marketing campaign to implementing some of the practices we talked about today. To talking to your agencies or the people that you work with on what more can we do? What more keywords can we go after? How's that blog strategy going? Targeting the right keywords, right? And really be proactive instead of be, a lot of times people are reactive where they just point the finger and they get angry when the problem happens. But if you, every business out there that we're talking to today and in general are going to have trouble with lead generation at some point in time throughout the year. It's just a process of cycles. But if you're prepared for it and understand it and you've said it in processes to help you during those bad times, you've done a great job. And now there's a lot more, Liz, I can definitely say about this customer service topic. Maybe I can join you guys again here soon. You have 30 seconds, Dan. Maybe I can join you guys again here soon. But again, I just want to say, anybody that wants help, just reach out to me. Even if you're not a paying client and don't want to become a paying client with me, you can reach out to me. I'd be happy to help out a small business owner. I thank you very much for letting me be a part of this, Liz. So Dan, give me your contact info so I can put it in the comments here. Do you have a website? How do you want? Yeah, I'll send it to you to my private chat here. How I'm doing that, Maria, why don't you give a quick plug about something you're doing these days that is somewhat relevant? Yeah, with listening cells, correct? Yeah. So we talked about generating the leads and getting your phone to ring. Well, once you've got the phone ringing, we got to be able to know how to talk to people and how to properly provide that customer service and listen to what they're saying and be able to connect with that prospect in a really quick, effective way in a relationship-based way so that we can actually get them to want to use our services. So one thing that we're working on, Dan, I don't know if I actually told you, but Liz and Mr. Dan Smith, I know you know really well, we've actually created a program to help everybody do that. So we'll release a little bit more information and have everybody a chance to kind of check it out. We're super excited about it. I think it's gonna be really effective. Yeah, and I can tell you from experience with Maria and Dan Smith, they've both been clients of ours for years now, it seems like, but they are very, very wanting to help people out there. They're genuinely, genuinely good people and they really want to do as much as they can to assist you with those platforms and things like that. So I can definitely endorse Maria and Dan as good quality people to work with. How about me, Dan? Me too. Liz is great. Liz is like the bubble. That goes unsaid. Liz is like the bubbles in the room, right? You just wanna smile all the time when you see them. So she's really, I mean, you just, listen, one thing to me with Liz is she's sharp. She is sharp as a tack. She comes off like a sweet and easy going great person, but when she sees something, she goes after it. She's very passionate, very, very passionate. I'm sorry about that sometimes. She's very, very passionate about what she does and I appreciate that. You need passion with what you do to be successful and Liz has that for sure. And so as do you, which I really love. I love being able to talk to you, Dan, because you know your stuff. A lot of times, actually it's not even that. That's one piece of it. I do love that you know your stuff, but another thing that I really, really love about you is you are true to what you do. You're not about being at all sneaky or like trying to trickster or I was talking to somebody just a couple of weeks ago and he kept saying over and over again. It's kind of a trick, just gotta be tricky. I was like, yeah, I don't like that. No, you need transparency, you need transparency. Yeah, and I was gonna say talking to you, the really cool thing is it seems like every time we talk, this is exactly what we saw today out of you is exactly every conversation with you. I love it, it's like I've known you for years. Yeah, my wife calls me the Flanders of the Simpsons because I'm always smiling and things like that, which is very true. I enjoy talking and you know, not everything's rainbows out there, right? What, you like to talk, what? Yeah, I mean, not everything's rainbows, right? There's no perfect marketing agency out there, right? There's gonna be times where the keywords we work on are gonna go down because of keyword fluctuations and visibility issues with Google's algorithm, but we're continually focused and understand the issues to get them back to where they need to get to, right? And so you just have to understand that there's no marketing agency that's gonna do perfect for you and then maintain everything you want for them. It's always gonna be fluctuations, as long as it's like the stock market, like a roller coaster upward and you're constantly growing kind of in that path, you're good to go. So, but yes, you're right. Communication is a very big issue in the digital marketing world, especially with those millennials, gosh. All right, guess what, we are going over and guess what's happening? All of our viewers are like dropping like stone. Whoa! I'm so sorry, y'all. Okay, again, thank you so much, Dan. Maria, thanks for co-hosting here with me and we will let y'all go. See you in a bit. Bye, y'all. Adios.