Paid Marketing for Plumbing, HVAC & Home Services - Plumbing & HVAC SEO

So if you are excited to dive into some new paid search strategies, really how to maximize your lead flow online for your plumbing HVAC home service business, just give me one of the comments. So like, you know, we’re ready to ready to hit the ground running. So here’s what we’re gonna cover on today’s session, we’re going to be talking about why paid marketing is the key to unlimited scalability in terms of your lead flow for your plumbing, HVAC, or home service business, I’m going to be unpacking the paid strategies that are working best in today’s market. And this is a constantly moving target, right? What was what was the best thing you could be doing last year is a little bit different this year. So we’ve been talking about kind of the present and future of online marketing strategies, I’m going to be sharing some live examples of paid marketing strategies generated five to 15 times return on investment for other plumbing HVAC home service companies, just like yours. We’ll talk a little bit about how to structure your pay per click campaigns to really maximize your return on investment and minimize your cost per lead. And then we’ll talk about the KPIs. I’ll share some examples of landing pages and tracking structures you want to put in place to really get the best results possible. So if that sounds good, just a bid in the comments. Or if you’re watching this on Facebook type good in the comments. That way I know you’re ready to hit the ground running Josh, thank you very much up So real quick, who I am. Why should listen. My name is Josh Nelson. I’m the author of The Complete Guide to Internet Marketing for plumbing HVAC contractors, how to triple your sales by getting your internet marketing right. By it’s a real problem than any of the other stuff, you know, books I’ve written groups I’m a part of is that at this point, I’ve had the opportunity to work with hundreds of plumbing HVAC home service contractors in some of the most competitive markets across the country, and have been able to help them go from virtually non existent online to where they’re now the dominant players in their market. One of our clients have seen over a billion dollars in revenue growth by really dialing in their marketing. And so what I’m sharing and what I’m going to be unpacking with you guys today is isn’t based on theory, it’s based on working with companies just like yours and kind of testing what works, figuring out which levers we can pull to generate more leads, more book jobs and accelerated revenue growth. So that’s what we do here. By the way, at planting H SEO, we’re on a mission to help triple this up the sales of 1000 Plumbing HVAC and home service companies. And so you know, if as you’re watching this, you’re interested in talking with us about how we can help you generate better results online. We’d love to chat. So feel free to get a plumber SEO dotnet slash schedule there, you can pick a time will do a deep dive review of your current online marketing and show you hey, here’s what’s good. Here’s where there’s room for improvement. And based on your goals, here’s how we can help. So if that sounds good, we’d love the opportunity to meet with you one to one. And we’ll show you how to tap into the power of this this strategy. So let’s get on to it. Like when we look at online marketing, and we look at really how you can accelerate the growth in your plumbing HVAC home service company. There’s really three key things right, I’ve got a model for this, but I thought this visual just made it easy. The first thing we have to do is we’ve got to drive leads, right we have to drive leads we found near the q3 rates to drive leads or organic, right making sure we’re coming up in Google Maps making sure we’re coming up organically when people search for plumbing plumbing company HVAC contractor in our area. The second is paid search. So tapping the local service ads, tapping into Google ads, tapping into other paid strategies, and then root tapping into your database, right figuring out how to take your past customers, your past prospects, nurture them with email, SMS phone, and convert more of those one time buyers into repeat buyers and refer you to others. These are the three key strategies for driving leads. Today, we’re going to be focusing on page search, right really what page strategies you can tap into. Secondly, that we have to maximize conversions. So really, to accelerate your growth, you got to have a great website that’s built to convert with so when someone gets there, they want to choose you versus the competition. Secondarily, we’ve got to have a great reputation, lots of reviews from your real customers and your true service area. That will you do what you say, right? Those reviews really impact how well you convert. And then the third is automation, right? We won’t, we don’t want to just get leads and rely only on the far right. We want to be leveraging automation to follow up with them via email, follow up them SMS, follow up with them through automation over time. And we find that once you get that piece dialed in all of the other lead generation that you do is so much more effective. And the third you have to optimize your results. So you gotta be constantly looking at, alright, how much should we spend, what’s the return on investment? What’s our average cost per lead, and to really, to really accelerate your growth, you have to be looking at the total spend or have the equation, right? Sometimes when we look at, okay, I got to a million How do I go to 2 million or I got to 2 million? How do I go to 5 million? Oftentimes, you want to have a fixed budget, right, we’re gonna say I’m gonna spend five grand a month in my marketing. And that worked for me to get to a million. But I’m not going to the next level. And what we find is, usually you want to be reinvesting at least 10 to 15% of your revenue back into marketing. And so usually, when I look at that home service contractors that are stagnated, they’re not getting accelerated growth, it’s like, we got to spend a little bit more like we got to have more gasoline to put into Google ads to put into local service ads to put into a strategic retargeting campaign. And when we get all of these three key areas dialed in, we’re driving leads on a consistent basis, we’re converting them at the highest level, and we’re optimizing around the results. That’s where we get accelerated growth. So I always like to start with that model, because these are the three key things. And then you know, today, we’re really going to be going deep on paid strategies and really paid marketing to to drive the lead flow forward. And so as you look at the overall marketing strategy, and all of the different things you can do to generate leads and to generate sales, this is our digital dominance method. And we talk about organic paid retargeting online directories, local service ads, social media, marketing, automation, repeat, and referral strategies to get those one time customers to become repeat buyers. They’re really when you got this whole digital dominance method, optimized, you’re in control of your own destiny in terms of how fast you can grow, and how you can take things to the next level. So specifically, as it relates to paid marketing, and whether paid marketing should even be part of the equation. We started as an SEO company, right? When we extract SEO, I really believe the foundation of your marketing should be organic, right? It should be because you, you’re ranking well. And you’re coming up when people are looking for you in the non paid listings. And I know that the highest quality lowest cost leads you can get are from organic. With that said, you want to have other strategies to be out in front of your customers. So yes, paid should be part of your strategy really, because first of all, if you can get quick results with paid search, so SEO organic, right, building a website, putting out content, getting yourself ranked has a long tail, but it takes a long time, like you’ve got to really plant those seeds on a consistent basis over an extended period of time, where with Google ads, local service ads, retargeting, one of those campaigns, you can set a budget, and if you structure it correctly, you can start coming up when your customers are looking where they’re looking, and you can start to generate leads, you know, in a matter of days, as opposed to in a matter of months. A second to that, I really think the reason paid marketing should be part of your strategy is because you’re gonna show up as often as possible where your customers are looking. But when somebody is in your local area, looking for a plumber looking for an AC contractor looking to install some indoor air quality equipment, or to fix their electrical, we want to be the person that comes up as often as possible, we want to come up in the pain, we want to come up in the organic, we want to come up on the directories, we want to put our best foot forward for those people that are the very bottom of the blind fall. And that’s where paid gives you the ability to show up very consistently across the spectrum of where your prospects are looking. And it gives you the ability to have multiple placements, right. Sometimes we can be in local service ads, we can be in the paid ads, we can be on the map. And we can be organically listed in the organic listings and in some directory listings, and we find it if you get at least two or three placeholders in those spots where your prospects are looking, you were five times more likely to get the call to get the lead and ultimately to get the sale. It gives us the ability to show up for more terms like with SEO, we can show for geo modified terms in most cases, right? So if you’re in Miami and they type in Miami plumber, Miami Drain Cleaning Miami Water Heater Repair. When we put the Miami in the modifier we can we can really do well with that. But sometimes we want to show up just because right just because they typed plumber just because they typed Drain Cleaning just because they typed AC repair. And with paid search and with paid marketing strategies, we can make sure we were coming up regardless of if there’s a geo modifier there or not. And ultimately, for me, the reason you want to have a P component to your strategy is because it gives you unlimited scalability, right if you think about

as you grow when you think okay, I’m gonna bring you in, I want to build a 3 million. We know we need to have technicians. We need to have trucks. We need to have guys that are trained and ready to go out there. But we can only do that if we get we’ve got a knob we can turn to say, Hey, I’ve got this other truck. And so technician ready to go, how do I get the weeds coming in? How do I make sure that we’ve got the deal flow to get those technicians out on a consistent basis, the beauty of paid marketing really, as I unpack this for you, with an optimized budget, you have unlimited access to lead flow, there are more than enough people in the market for your services every single day to keep your entire fleet busy, to the tune of there are home service companies in almost every market across America doing 10s If, if not hundreds of millions of dollars per year. So, you know, there’s plenty of opportunity, there’s plenty of households that need the services. Paid search gives you the nod to say, Okay, I’m ready, I’m ready to tap in to, you know, another 100 to 200 leads per month. Right? And so give me a yes, if that makes sense. Kind of like, you know, the foundation is organic. But the, the knob that we can turn is our paid strategy. And so we’re gonna be we’re gonna be talking about, you know, really how to structure your organic, your paid, and you’re retargeting to truly maximize your lead flow online. And what I want to do now is I want to unpack this model with you guys, because I think I like to think in terms of models. And we talked about the accelerated growth model, are you guys able to see me is me on the big screen right now? Is that what you’re seeing? I want to make sure that’s the case before. Before I go forward, pushing, Can you unmute? And just confirm. Okay, good. You are seeing me big. Okay. So give me one second while my screen pulls back up here. Interesting. Alright, so when it comes to paid, right, I’m going to call this the, the paid accelerator. So this is all paid strategies that we can tap into. I’m really there’s there’s three key pillars to this in my mind, there’s paid search. Which is very directional, right directional, meaning, if they’re searching Google, or they’re searching online, and they have a home service need, they’re at the bottom of the funnel, they have a problem right now that needs to be saw paid search, right. And then there’s paid social. Right, which is more there. They are just in your market, they meet your market demographics. And we want to be in front of them with an offer, right. And while this can be really effective, paid social, obviously, you’re your person that isn’t immediate demand for your services, you’re going to be highest intent. And so we tend to prioritize paid search. But as you start thinking about branding, as you start thinking about having the ability to create demand for your services, whether they were looking or not, there’s definitely a place for paid social. And then those are paid directories. And pay per lead services. Right. And if you think about it, really everything falls into these three buckets, right? Paid search, paid social, and paid paid directories, and pay per click. So why my belief, and really where I think most of us should prioritize our effort is over directional advertising, right is initially, let’s make sure we’re capturing the market that’s already looking for our services already ready to do something right now. And so we do that through Google ads. Right? This is to me, number one, Google ads. We can show up for any term based on when someone’s looking for us in a marketplace. Right. And so Google ads, then we’ve got local service ads, which I’m sure all of you guys know, is Google guaranteed. It’s the little three box at the top. Definitely want to be playing in local service ads. It’s also very search based, right? They searched either you came up or you didn’t, right. And you know, there’s money to be spent here if you optimize it correctly. And then when we think about paid I also like to think of retargeting.

Just because if we’re showing up organically, and they got to a website, or they clicked on a local service ad, or they clicked on a Google ad, and they get to our site, we know they’re in the market and they may need a may have not occurred yet. They may have not submitted a form yet. With retargeting. We can serve ads strategically to that group, and get them back to our website and really improve the probability that they’re going to convert. And so these are our paid search strategies. I’m going to be talking about these when More depth as we go up. And then you’ve got your pain, social strategies, which would be Facebook ads, tick tock ads, and YouTube. And there’s definitely a place for this, as you like, look at building your brand, as you look at trying to create demand for people that you know may not be immediately in need, right because paid search again, they were looking for you paid social, we just know they’re a homeowner that has a certain amount of income, maybe they did something that we can we can serve ads against. But this to me is a it’s a bigger picture play as you’ve already really optimized your organic and your paid search strategies. Now, the other directional opportunity that we should be tapping into is our paid directories and our pay per lead services. So the big ones are Angie, right, and home advisor. I know some of you are cringing because you hate home advisor. And maybe you’ve started to hate Angie. But the reality is they come up very prominently as people are looking, they’ve developed the biggest brand in the industry, when someone’s in the market for the services. And we definitely want to be on these directories, we definitely want to be playing in these directories because it’s one of those other placeholders where your your prospects are going to be looking. And if you’ve got some some automation in place, I’ll talk a little bit about why automation sport work comes into play. You can really, you can really optimize these leads. And you can ruin the day even though it’s going to a number of contractors, and it may be the most competitively you can you can get. Also you’re also we’ve got Yext, Yelp and next door coming on big. Next door has got a great advertising platform now where you can advertise you get in front of your local market. And it’s a little bit untapped, right. If you compare this to like your Angie’s List or HomeAdvisor everybody in their mother’s in there, lots of contractors either love or hate Yelp and it’s more popular in certain markets. But next door is a little bit under the under the radar. And we’ve got your traditional paper lead services like E local, and Thumbtack. I’ve been seeing good results for clients using contact recently. And so this is the big picture right these like if you think about paid advertising strategies, you can tap into tons and tons and tons and tons of opportunity here just looking at paid search paid social, paid ads and directories. The key thing well that stitches all of these together and that will make you win or lose for the most part is retargeting. And automation. The reason I say that is there is going to be investing money in any of these strategies to get people into your role to get them into your sphere. If we’re not retargeting them, we’re not going to be able to capitalize at the level we could retargeting it as the bonus show up in the banners show up in their social feed. And they’re seeing it they’re like, oh, man, you know, I was in the need for, you know, for a new air conditioning system. And now you guys are advertising to me with special offers and incentives, right, you have a higher probability of winning that deal. And their automation is just making sure you’re you’re the first person to contact them via phone, text, message and email and that you’re touching them a number of times, automatically. We found that you know, if you were any of these paid strategies with retargeting automation that are properly dialed in, you can really you can like five to 10x the outcome. So again, pardon my scribbles here, hopefully it’s clear enough but your views are the different place any any questions or thoughts on that as we’re as we’re kind of unpacking this in further in further detail and I’ll make sure that you guys have a nice clean visual of this actually make sure my sharing my screen again because I will go back to screen share mode and

wrong screen I want to share screen three perfect so there’s a nice pretty visual of this. Hopefully that’s a little bit easier to see and easier to to digest. So if you think about okay, I get it like I’m gonna read through the different plays the different page strategies that are working that we can tap into. The next question usually is like what order would I roll this out? What order does it make sense? Should I be spending on tick tock ads, which will be all in on my you know, my local service ads like Where should I be spending the dollars. And what I’m gonna suggest is, first of all your organic is the foundation, right? You need to have a good website that’s built to convert that’s coming up that your is properly optimized for your local market and the services that you offer, right, that’s search engine optimization, right, that’s your highest quality, lowest cost lead, you have to have a good foundation to build your strategy on. So for me, that’s one after that, the next logical thing for you to invest your dollars into, from a marketing perspective, are paid search and local service ads, right, because it’s, again, it’s super directional, they’re at the bottom of the funnel, they’re looking for your services. One there, I think, you want to make sure before you start putting a lot of other marketing strategies in place, you got retargeting enabled, which means you got a pixel on your website and your marketing back to those people that got to your site, but maybe didn’t convert. And you want to make sure that you have automation in place that everyone that calls in, that submits a lead form that requests more information, there’s automatic follow up happening to make sure that those leads get followed up with and get followed through with. From there, I think moving up the hierarchy, we want to make sure we’re tapping in to our paid directories in those paid lead services, right, we want to make sure we’re tapping into and she when when a home advisor, thumbtack next door, we’re coming up on those places. And then as you move up the hierarchy, and you start thinking about Brandt are usually at that, you know, 5 million to $10 million plus range, you know, you’ve tapped into all of your low hanging opportunities at the base of the foundation. And that’s like we want to now dominate the market, we want to be the most known home service contractor in the area, we want to create demand for our services. Really, that’s when your social advertising makes a ton of sense. That’s when we start running aggressive Facebook ads into a local area with video and special offers, maybe we start tapping into Tik Tok and YouTube ads. So that’s the hierarchy. Hopefully that makes sense. Hopefully that that helps kind of seeing the flow kind of when you would plug these things in just a one in the comments if you’re tracking along. And this is a helpful visual to think about, okay, I want to my organic and then I want to be tapping into my paid. And then I want to be tapping into those paid directories. Awesome getting some simple ones. So I’m not just talking to my screen here in a vacuum. So let’s dive into this. And let’s talk about the key strategies and how to make this work at the highest level possible. So I said First off, the first thing you want to tap into is your directional advertising the people at the bottom of the funnel that are really looking for you. To me right now, from a paid perspective, the best bang for your buck is going to be local service ads, that’s to Google guaranteed. That’s the the three listings that come up at the very top of the results, you know, in the markets that this is active, which is everywhere. Now, the clients that we have that are coming up in the three rotation that are really tapping into this are getting great results, right? Low cost per lead high quality leads. And we’re just really like, let’s open the budget. Let’s open the mouth as wide as we can to tap into all of these local service add opportunities. And so a little bit of a step by step on this and kind of what you want to do first things you have to get set up. If you’re not, I would imagine if you’re on this session and your home service company, you’ve already done your background checks, you’ve already added yourself to the Google guarantee program. If you haven’t go get yourself set up. That’s kind of phase one. It’s not hard. But there’s some hoops to jump through to get it done. The second is you want to make sure that you’ve really dialed in your service area, your profile and your budget. Right. So usually, if we take on a new client, they’ve already got local service ads running, but they’re not getting in three, right? They’ve got their budget open, but they’re not getting in the three. Sometimes it’s because the service area isn’t properly set up, the profile isn’t fully optimized over budget, you know, they’ve set the small budget, in my mind, you open that budget to $10,000 a month, right? And then you start there and you kind of expand it. Because usually what’s happening is you’re not able to spend the full budget unless you’re like one of the top three. So that’s the next piece.

When it comes to remaining relevant on Google Local Service ads, you have to play the game, right. And so the way Google has this structured is they’re serving these ads, they’re charging on a per call basis. And they’re guaranteeing that you’re going to do what you say that you’re going to provide quality service, you’re not going to rip the people off. And they’re underwriting that. I think their purpose here is to serve a better a better experience for the searcher is on Google. Right. And so that being the case, they optimize this platform where there’s a back end, where you as the contractor need to mark the outcomes or Have those jobs, right? The call came in? Did you dispatch it? Did you lose it? What was the outcome. And so make a point to have you or somebody on your team go in and mark the disposition of every single one of the jobs that you get through local service ads. Obviously, you want to deal with the disputes every now and then you’ll get one outside the territory, you’ll get one that isn’t like really the services that you provide. But I think the two main things are marked the jobs that you bought, and drive verified reviews, right, make sure that you’re getting reviews from those customers as often as possible, right. And you do that by creating a great experience by going out and doing a good job calling in advance during the pre dispatch stuff, creating a great experience. But then leveraging automation, and leveraging the platform to say, hey, we’d love it, if you’d post a review, and literally emphasize the need for them to go and write a review, all things being equal. There’s lots of contractors that want to come up in the Google guaranteed in local services, but the ones that are gonna win are the ones that are closing up their jobs, getting the most reviews, and are serving the best outcomes, as far as what Google has in their in their dashboard, that are going out getting three jobs and then getting reviews after the fact. And then work a benchmark we’d like to shoot for is get get a high dispatch rate for the jobs that come in, or for the calls that come in on your local service ads. And in the backend, you get a dashboard where you can see how many calls did we get? What was their average cost per call? What you know, what was our booking rate, and you want to be looking for 85% or more, I find that when you do that, right, and you get your budget optimized inside local service ads, you can, you can be pretty consistent in the top three. So do this right, I would say this is your number one priority from a paid ads perspective, maximize your your output through the local service ads platform. In certain markets, you’re not in the three, you’ve, you’ve put the huge budget, you may have been too late to the game, right, in which case, you know, just keep keep yourself in there. But you know, there’s only there’s only three people that are really kind of rotating in there typically. So it is what it is at some level, right? Do the best you can put your best foot forward. And if you are in the rotation, really be aggressive with marking those jobs and getting those reviews that really makes a big, big difference. So that’s local service ads. I’ve got a whole hour long session on this, I want to make sure that this is relevant. And we’re kind of hitting the key elements here. Open up your budget there play as aggressively as you can. Number two, for me in terms of this, this strategy is is playing with Google ads, right and making sure that we’re coming up in the paid results where our clients and prospects are searching. And there’s lots of things that you can do to optimize your Google Ads campaigns to get the best results possible. And I want to kind of talk through that with you, and really walk you through what you can do and what you should be looking for from your provider assuming you don’t run this in house to get the best outcomes possible. And unfortunately, most Google ad campaigns fail. Like as I talk with warming, HVAC, electrical contractors, a lot of times they try Google ads, whether it was through one of the big companies or they tried to do it on their own. And I say, Man, I spent I spent the money, but I just got no ROI. I felt like I was just throwing money down the toilet. Yes, it comments if that’s your you feel like man I tried and it didn’t really work all that well. Well, the reason most, okay, the reason most of these campaigns fail, is not really understanding the way the Google ad auction process works. Because it’s not just about bidding more for any given key term, right? A lot of people just think, Oh, well, I want to come up for a plumber or plumbing plumbing company near me, Drain Cleaning. And I’m gonna outbid the competition. Well, again, Google wants to serve the best results, and the best experience for the customer, right for the person searching on Google. And so Relevancy is important, making sure that you’re matching your key word.

And the text ad to the landing page, so that the person actually clicks it. And so your click through rate and the stick rate on the page, and what happens, once they get there plays a big part in how well your AdWords or your Google ads campaign is going to conform. There’s what Google calls a quality score metric that’s running underneath your Google ads campaign that will really determine whether you have to spend more per click or less per click to remain in a top, you know, relevant search result for most of the keywords. And so reason most most campaigns fail is because people don’t understand that whoever is running the campaign, just figure you’re not planning company, HVAC company. It’s all the same. We’ll put all Over keywords into an into a an ad campaign will drive it all to the homepage. And relevancy isn’t very high conversion rates aren’t very high. And so it winds up failing. And so this is visual here, right? We don’t just within plumbing, there’s lots of different subcategories of what someone’s searching for. Right? They might look for job in general, they might be in an emergency, they might be looking for repiping, or septic, or bathroom remodeling or leak detection, right. And if you take all of those key words, you have basically the same text ad that comes up, and then you drive them to the homepage, your Relevancy is going to be low, and so is your conversion rate. And so there’s, there’s really some things you want to do to structure a pink campaign to get better results. And so what I want to show you guys is just a couple of examples of Google Ads campaigns, converting at a really high level, and then kind of walk you through what you want to think about in terms of your campaign structure. And in terms of like, maybe who’s handling your online marketing, to get better results. And so one of the companies, we work with this Cardinal, out of Wisconsin, out of the Wisconsin area. Here’s, here’s their dashboard, and we track our metrics for paid search very, very closely. So they got a total marketing spend of about $12,000 per month. For that we track like how many leads did they get? How many phone calls, how many web submissions for that 12k investment that generate about 936? leads a second divide that out to about $12.82 per lead, really important to know these metrics, like to know how much do we spend? How many leads do we get? What’s our average cost per lead. And then if we look at that, it kind of breaks down to around 23 from organic, which would be people clicking on the the organic listings, because they rank well, Jordan 24, via paid search, which is Google ads, and then 387, from Google Maps to come to a total of three 936. So if we drill down just on the paid component in this just on the paid search, that’s 9000 are spent straight to Google, that’s 224 track leads for an average cost per lead of about $40 per lead, this is a solid cost per lead, we find that we can go up to about 125 In most markets, and still have a positive ROI, assuming you’ve got conversion rates that are solid, assuming your technicians know how to sell in the home and kind of maximize the average ticket. But anything less than 100 is really what we’re shooting for. And we know that we can, we can kind of scale the budget based on that. So using this as an example, just kind of back to the math numbers here. Turned 24 leads assuming a 40% conversion rate from lead either called in or submitted a form or started chat, we’re looking for much higher than 40%. But assuming a 40% conversion rate, that would be 89 bookshops. 89 jobs booked into the home and sold average ticket assumption 750. I know some of you guys probably gotten richer average ticket is in the field. But we see much higher than this, we see lower than this, unfortunately, some cases, just using an average ticket of 750 a night jobs and an average ticket of 750 is 666,700 $50,000 in revenue on that spend of about $9,000. So that’s an eight time return on investment. 78 time return on investment, solid right solid for plumbing and HVAC. I’m not sure where our example we’ll get into the into the meat potatoes. There’s a company we work with in Miami called Falcon plumbing. On we can see here about a $6,000 investment in online marketing for 440 track leads average cost per lead $14.28. We kind of break that down at from organic to 37 from pay per click 109 from Google.

If we like zoom in, right, and this is what you want to be able to do with your reporting, when you run paid ads is going to really clearly see what’s my total spend. And when it comes to the actual spend in the ads, whether it’s Facebook ads or Google Ads wherever it goes, What’s the result of that particular channel 237 leads on $303,842 spent average cost per lead for plumbing in Miami a massive metropolitan area $16.21 per lead. If we do the same math here using a 40% conversion rate, that’s 94 book jobs, average ticket a little bit lower in this case by 5094 jobs at 550 is $51,000 in revenue on a $3,000 spend is a 13 time return on investment. And so I could I could unpack example after example after example, when you get your paid search strategy right. When you will dial this in, you can expect a five to 15 Time return on your investment. And it only gets better. If you’ve got marketing automation in place to convert more of those jobs, it only gets better if you’ve got great technicians that really know how to take that single ticket from 550, to 750 to 1500, whatever the number is, in your particular case, but as long as we get at least a three time return on investment in most home service companies, three times return on investment, you can still be profitable on those leads, right? Especially if you can convert the one time customer into a repeat buyer that uses you multiple times, buys a Home Service Program, or refers you to at least one other person. And so hopefully it’s helpful or give me a helpful in the comments helpful to see some real world examples and case studies of true campaigns getting these types of results. Joseph says yes, thank you. So how do we set this up? How do we how do we set up and structure Pay Per Click marketing for maximum lead generation and maximum return on investment? First things first, you know, without getting too technical, and I try to keep this at 20. Like, well focus on the 20% of things that drive 80% of the results. Conversion Tracking is a must, right, do not run Pay Per Click ads. If you can’t clearly state, there’s so much I spent, there’s so many leads I generated. And this is my average cost per lead. That’s phase one, right? Because if you don’t have that in place, it’s very easy to spend a lot of money and be like, I don’t know, I hope it works. I mean, I hope I think I’m getting a return on investment. Like you need to have this conversion tracking, and whoever is running, your campaign should have it matched up so that the conversion can be tracked back to the ad group or keyword, so that you can optimize the campaign around the ad the structure that’s actually generating the results. So conversion tracking is super, super important. We want to break things down into smaller ad groups. So we’re breaking down the plumbing into its component parts HVAC into its component parts. And like grouping the keywords that are specific to the specific thing that they’re looking for, um, have to be paying attention to negative keywords. Negative keywords would be if someone types in auto AC repair, like totally different, right, they might, they were looking for auto AC repair. If you don’t have auto as a negative keyword in your campaign, just as an example, you could be spending a lot of money on those clicks that have no relevance and actually are like absolutely not going to give her because they’re looking for an auto repair shop that can fix the the the air conditioning in their.

In their car. We are negative lists are about it’s 1000s of keywords at this point, because there’s so many little permutations that are obvious gotchas. Um, so you know, don’t run an ads campaign. Without real well thought out and built negative keywords, have to make sure that your text ads resonate with the customer and entice them to click you versus the competition, right, it’s not just about stacking a bunch of keywords into a text, add your text that needs to be very persuasive. Right, it needs to sell the click, because that’s going to give you a higher click through rate, by means out of the amount of times you come up. Google’s tracking what percentage of those people click on you, right your click through rate, if it’s higher than the competition, because the text that is more persuasive, is going to have a higher quality score. Hence, you’re gonna be able to pay less to still maintain top positioning in your in your search terms, we will leverage ad extensions, which there’s little things you can add to your text ad, like your location, your reviews that make it take up more space in the search result. So you really want to make sure that we’ve we’ve stacked the deck in our in our favor by adding as many of those ad extensions as possible. You have to live visitors on a solid landing page. Alright, I’ve tested this. And initially I was like, Well, if you’ve got a good website with differences in me, well, the difference is we want single direction, we want them to click on our page and take an action, especially if we paid seven to $12 to $15. For that individual click, we want a room like, alright, we’re looking for drain cleaning, what are your guys, here’s why you want to click costs. Here’s why you want to schedule now. And really make sure that you’re taking them through a earlier path and not like just opening up your entire website when they click on it. And then you have to be on an ongoing basis. Split testing your text ads, split testing your landing pages, split testing based on what’s working and fine tuning if all you did. And unfortunately, this is the average situation if all you did was say alright, I’m a plumbing company. I’m an HVAC company. Let’s go pick the keyword and let’s write one text ad. Let’s drive that to a landing page. And let’s set a $5,000 a month budget. It’s destined to fail like literally you there’s no way to win in that scenario. It takes ongoing looking at the metrics looking at what was actually getting killed. At the BIOS level, what’s converting at the highest level to get this to a place where you can get an average cost per lead that makes financial sense, and remain productive with the outcomes from your pay per click advertising? So, really, I’m gonna say again, I’m 31. Think about spending a penny. If you have conversion tracking in place, if you don’t know, like, how many leads are coming in on the back end of your paid ads? I think you want to look at that if you’re running it in house, or whether you get this out to a third party contractor, like do they really kind of Route telling you? How much did you spend? How many leads Did you generate? And are you optimizing based on those results, and fundamentals?

At the most basic level, you want dynamic number swapping, so that when somebody types in Dallas, AC repair, and they click on your landing, or they click on your ad, and then they get to your landing page, this should be a different number that comes up because they came through paid search. And there should be a number pool, which means the number rotates. So we can track back which keyword they typed in which text ad they saw that drove the conversion, right. That’s dynamic number swapping with keyword pools is really the way you want to do it. That’s you want to make sure whoever’s running this for you, has at least that level of tracking in place. And so you can go back in here the calls and track the outcomes of those of those leads, you want to have webform tracking, because not everybody calls, sometimes they’re gonna click, and they’re gonna fill out a form, but you need to know which keyword which ad group drove that web form lead? And same thing with with chat right nowadays? Yes, we’re tracking calls, we’re tracking web forms, we’re also tracking chat, like, did they start a chat with you from Ruby or from home service chat or something else, you really, really want to track that because otherwise your metrics are going to skew, you know, you may have gotten more leads than you thought that you were losing leads to the chat widget, right. And make sure you’ve got all of those tracking elements in place. And of course, you want to push the the conversion data back into Google ads, right. And that’s a little bit more of a sophisticated thing to do. But you need to do that, so that you can let the machine learning identify which campaigns are generating the best results. So hard. I mean, I know if you’ve never run ads, this is hard to kind of like conceptualize, but we’re just learning about the way it should be structured, which should help you think more logically about the results you can expect. And I should help you think more logically about how to communicate back to whoever it is that does this for you. So hang on, we need these things. In place of KPIs, you want to know what the key performance indicators are, and what you should be tracking. So for me polls, Ben, are we spending enough, right? Oftentimes, you know, we said, Okay, I’m gonna spend 2500 bucks a month in in Google Apps.

So we want to set it and forget it. But the reality is, if you want to continue to grow, you want to continue to scale that spend needs to go up, right, especially if the average cost per lead makes sense, especially if the results are dialing. So we need to know what the total spend is, we should be able to look at our like what our budget is versus impression share. So, you know, based on the keywords you’re bidding on, there’s a certain amount of people typing those keywords in every single month. It’s not hard to figure out what percentage of the search you’re missing based on budget. So you should know that how much we’re spending, what’s my percentage of search impression share loss? So if I spent five grand, but I should have spent 25. Grand? How much search did I miss? Right? Hopefully, hopefully, that makes sense. You know, your average hospital with what’s, what’s it costing every time somebody clicks on me? But most importantly, I think for most of you guys, is what’s my average cost per lead? Like, is it costing me $20? Or is it costing me $190? Right, we need to know what that average cost per lead is. And then when you’re online, what your average conversion rate is what your average ticket is. So you can quantify return on investment. What we’re seeing across the board in markets, and we work the entire the entire United States, we’ve got plumbing HVAC, home service companies, as well as Canada and a little bit international plumbing leads on average between 35 and $55 per lead. We’re trying to keep the KPI kind of below $55 per lead for HVAC received about 55 to $80 per lead. And this is your actual spend, divided by number of leads average cost per lead that we’re shooting for electrical between 15 and $30 per lead. And then of course, we want to know our return on investment, right how much I spend on the leads that I generate, and what’s the ROI, right. Am I actually getting a tangible, measurable return on my investment? I think you know, the best way to know that is to have a dashboard. And we spent a lot of time dialing in our dashboard so we can show this What you spent, right four grand, here’s how many leads we tracked for you from that 137. Here’s your average cost per lead $33.69. And then we use that a projected return on investment, right projected return on investment, which is, you know, if your average cost, or your average conversion rate is 40%, and your average ticket is $700, then we should have generated this amount in revenue. And so at a minimum, you need to have this, like you’ll anybody at home services should be able to have these metrics. And we want to be able to see what what’s her impression share last, due to due to budget. So in this case, if they were spending four grand, they only had a 12% impression share, which means there was still an entire 88% of search that we should have been able to tap into if we had a larger budget. And so this is something you want to be analyzing, as you grow as you scale, my average cost per lead makes sense. And I’ve got technicians that I could have dispatched, let’s increase the budgets, we’re tapping into more impression, share. So it’s great to have a dashboard like this, you need to know these numbers. And then in a perfect world, you want to try and actually read it all the way through to true return on investment. And so give me a one if you’re using Service Titan in here, and a lot of a lot of service Titan companies, we’re big fans of service Titan, we love the fact that we can put a number ring it through and see the true return or the true revenue generated from those leads. And so my suggestion is have your, especially your paid campaigns ring, specifically into the marketing scorecard on a pay per click number. So you can track how many calls came in on dashboard and the what actually came into service Titan, what’s our projected ROI, and what’s our actual revenue generated? Online, this is really, to me the gold standard, I think is the future of your marketing is really being able to tell how much you spend and what the true return on investment is. So you can optimize around what’s working best looks like chat is a pay per click ad servers that unusual. So

I mean, I could go super deep here, I don’t want to go too too deep, because I’m going to get into the weeds and you guys are going to start to tune out on me. Key campaigns we want to have would be like, just as an example, a brand campaign. So someone’s looking for your company by name, we want to come up for that we want to we want to dominate for that, right. And the beauty of it is your brand name was going to be low cost because you’re going to be super relevant for that term. We want to brand campaign, we want to make sure all the permutations of your name, you’re coming up in the paid search number one coming up number one organic bid coming up with a bunch of directory results. Sometimes I get into a little armwrestling match with with our clients, like I don’t want to bid on my brand name, because I’m already coming up for that. Well, if you don’t bid on it, and somebody has a broad match term that’s got your keywords in it, they’re going to come up above you for your own company name. And that’s the worst thing that can happen right does not cost you that much to make sure you’re dominating for your company name. We want the general campaign and then we want to get specific so like within Drain Cleaning, we might have hydrojetting and router service within water heaters. We went up Water Heater Repair water heater replacement, tankless water heaters, within sewer, we’re going to trash lists and pipe relining and re piping. And so you know, without getting crazy with this, like you really want to segment your ad groups into these various campaigns so that you can get super, super granular with the with the strategy. And so like just some screenshots here, like we want to have within planning with an HVAC, all of these different ad groups, which have a different set of key words that match to them. And it’s lots of different keyword match types and things. So I’m not going to get into you want to text ads specific to what they typed, right. So if they typed in Drain Cleaning, we want them to see like number one drain cleaning service, call our company today and route them straight to a page specific to that. Some of our top performing text ads, again, we want to stay that on page as much as possible. We want the customer or potential customer to CRN and click US versus the competition. So installation done right $200 off coupon same day service. So we’re giving incentives, we’re talking about the fact that we’re available today, top rated home, a Water Heater installed, call now on time guaranteed top rated AC installation company $2,500 off same day service. And then we want to use we want to use the extensions and the extension call outs to take up more space on the page. Right. And so we’ve got call extensions, we got slightly constructions we’ve got location extensions. All of this can take us from like three lines to like six lines for the same for the same span. So you know just just real think’s gonna come big difference in how well your your ad stands out in the Google Ads auction process. And so you do that within, you know, within the Google Ads account in the back end. Again, I don’t want to get super tech, but I wanted to kind of call your attention to what you want to make sure your text looks like, on the page. Now, beyond that, we really want to make sure we’re not driving traffic to our homepage, we want to our website in general, we want a specific page on the site. And so I’m just gonna pull up as an example, here. So this is snappy home services company we work with in the in the Georgia market. And so this is a landing page example. Right, so they typed emergency service. Number one local prompt service phone number in the top right hand corner, scheduled service option to fill out a form talks about the key reasons somebody wants to choose them shows testimonials and social proof. And we’ve limited them to like this small version of the site. Because if we look up snappy.

They’ve got a really great site, right, they got a great website. So it’s a pretty new site, it’s got a lot of like additional pages, and lots of stuff going on. And from an organic perspective, we want a great site like this, we want lots of great unique content, we want lots of information, we want lots of things for them to be able to look into and research. When it comes to paid search, whether that’s through retargeting, or through your actual Google Ads strategy, we want to make it limited, right, and we want to make sure that this is super optimized for mobile, so that they can quickly call, they can quickly schedule and make it really nice and tight. So that’s just an example of the difference between a landing page and a website. And we’ve tested this, obviously, we’ve tested I was a big believer for a long time, like, it’s better to drive to the website itself, what we did find, really looking at the data, a cigarette pack like this converts better. And that’s why we get better conversion rates from our campaigns. Winning comments have a receipt, like real example of a landing page and kind of how to structure this how to set it up to get better results. Awesome. And ears, there’s things you want to do on the page to make sure that it stands out. And then it makes it easy for the customer to choose you versus the competition, right mobile optimized special offer incentive ability to either call or go ahead and schedule directly on the page. I liked the idea having chat on there as well as another conversion factor, because some people just want a two way text, right, that would be a great way to convert those leads at a higher level. So I would imagine, most of you guys, don’t do this yourself and you don’t have a team in house, you probably have somebody that manages for you. So I wanted to give you some things to ask your paid search provider, just to make sure that they’re checking all the boxes, and that you’re getting the best strategy that you possibly can. The first question I like to ask, and I think this is really important, how much of my budget is gonna go to Google Ads versus management fees? What you really want to know, like, if you’re paying this company, five grand or 10 grand, how much of that is going to them in management fees, and every we all deserve to get paid to manage? But how much is actually going to the media? How much is going to Google ads, how much of it’s going to Facebook ads? If they don’t tell you that I think that’s a cause for concern. Like you need to know where your dollars are going. So you can make sure you’re you’re actually getting to the challenge you’re getting to the media and not just to management. You want to ask what type of tracking do they have in place? Like are they tracking how many leads came from the pay campaign? Are they actually tracking the webform? Conversions? Can you listen to recordings of those conversations? Like how is that structure? Again, you know, if you can’t delineate Pay Per Click versus organic, and be able to really see like, What’s your average cost per lead for either? That’s a big question mark, where you could be spent a lot of dollars and not getting the types of returns that you want. You should ask, like, how are we going to track our key performance indicators? Are they going to provide you a live dashboard of some sort where you can see what’s happening week by week, month by month, what your averages are? And then what are their key metrics? What are they shooting for on a per lead basis?

Are they going to be setting up a different landing page for each of the ad groups? If so, are they going to be driving specific ad groups to specific landing pages are the landing pages different from one to the next? Are they optimized for the actual keyword the person put in? Are they split testing the text ads for each of the ad groups. And then we’ve been leveraging ad, you know, call out extensions in order to really stand out on the page. And then most importantly, what are our targets in terms of cost per lead, and return on investment? Right? If they don’t have some idea what they’re shooting for, and they don’t have like an idea of what they expect the ROI to be? I would be concerned, right, like, because it’s easy, you could easily spend 10s of 1000s of dollars a month on your Google ads, and have little to nothing to show for it. Right. And so hopefully, this is helpful, Graham, take a screencap of this, I’ll send it out after the fact. But these are the things you want to ask whoever it is doing this reading, whether it’s in house, whether it’s out house, whatever, you know, what do we have in place? Or what are we doing on these key areas in our business? A couple of things that I feel we’ve really specialized here at plumbing, HVAC, SEO, when it comes to paid search with our paid campaigns is weird, very, very aggressive with how we split test into strategic ad groups based on plumbing, HVAC, electrical, we set up optimized landing pages, as you saw, like it’s very specific to the different ad groups, we have conversion optimization. So as conversions happen, we’ve got that data pulling into Google ads. And we’re able to automate and optimize the, you know, the budget, to the keywords into the campaigns that are converting best. And this makes a big difference in the return on investment. And you’ll know with us, you know exactly how many came from organic, how many came from pay per click, you’ll be able to hear recordings of those conversations, you so we do that I really think makes us stand out from the competition is we listened to every call and we can rate the outcomes. So we can tell you, we generated 227 leads of those, a few of them got scheduled. And seven of them didn’t get answered at all. And these are the ones that didn’t get scheduled. So we invest the time on our end at no additional cost to our clients to listen to these conversations and rate them and in your dashboard. You can see what were the outcomes for the leads that we invested in this particular month. You can know which keywords actually drove the ROI at what cost.

And we provide you with that dashboard. So you can see exactly what the results are. If you’re a service Titan user, we specialize in service Titan, we were one of the service Titan strategic partners. And so we can help you structure how you’re bringing into service Titan, how you’re tracking, and make sure that that’s all functioning the way that it should, so that you can really see the return on investment. I think that’s something because we’re so deep into the plumbing HVAC space that we we’ve got those relationships, and we understand how that technology works. So we can tap into it on your behalf. And complete transparency, right when it comes out. You know how much our management fee is. And you know exactly how much went to Google. How much went to retargeting, how much maybe went over to social media ads, if you’re at that level in the business. So complete transparency. So, again, I think paid search is super important, especially Google ads. So I spent a lot of time on this in this particular session. And I wanted to spend a little bit of time kind of delineating the difference between what we do and what some of the competition does, and kind of why our campaigns work a little bit better. So if you’re in that market right now, and you’re thinking, hey, you know, I’d like some help, I’d like to have Josh and his team do this for me, we’d love the opportunity to talk with you about that. And what we would do is just look at your current paid strategy, show you what’s good, where there’s room for improvement, what we might might do differently. And if we feel like there’s a specific outcome we can get that would be better than what you’re doing today. We would have a conversation about how we could work together. Christian Q drop awake, if someone wants to schedule in with us for that review on on their paid campaign. He’s got a plumber SEO dotnet slash schedule. Okay, so the first thing we optimize for was local service ads. The second thing we optimize for was Google ads. The third thing we want to think about we really want to do is leverage retargeting. And we want to leverage automation, right retargeting and automation so retargeting is when somebody gets the site, and they leave. We find something like 30 to 50% of the traffic, sometimes more in a lot of cases. They were in the market, they were on your site, but they didn’t submit the form they didn’t call in. So how can we remain top of mind with those people to get the click to get the call to get the lead? That’s where retargeting comes into play. We can drop a pixel on their browser. And now later in that day, when they go on ESPN, or when they pull up Facebook, they see your ad, right and it’s just feels to them like super timed advertising because they were in the market. And now they’re seeing you everywhere. We’re finding like a three to five time uplift in the conversion rates by putting retargeting in place. And so this visual one On the left is, you know, banner ads, and the different types of ads, you can run with a special incentive to try and get them back to the site to get that conversion. Now second of that is having automation in place to follow up with the leads that you do generate, right? If you’re running, SEO, you’re running paid search and running local service ads, you should be also automating the way in which you follow up with your leads. And the reason for that is that leads that don’t get followed up within 15 Minutes or Less go cold, right? It’s really a massive follow up if they submit a form, or they call in. And if you don’t answer, if you’re not back in touch with them, ideally two minutes or less. They’re clicking onto the competition, they’re calling somebody else, they’re booking it somewhere else. And so you’re losing that opportunity. So speed to lead is the first thing the reason we want to leverage automation. The second is the average customer has to be followed up with five to seven times before booking. So most of you home service companies are optimized for the phone call somebody calls in. Hey, thanks for calling those plumbing. How can I help you? Oh, okay. I can schedule Billy to go out there tomorrow at three. Does that work? Oh, no. Oh, you got to talk to somebody else. Okay, call us back.

Right. And if that person didn’t book right on that call, they’re gone. Right? There’s no one on your team that’s calling them that’s sending them a foul text message that’s trying to bring them back into the fold. And we know with automation, we can touch them again and again and again until they say yes, until we say no, or until they say go away. And the other the other big thing. And the reason automation is a must is today’s customer prefers text message, like they would much rather text message with you then call you. And so if you don’t have a platform where somebody can text back, yeah, I’m available for free. And you have somebody on the other side that can say, okay, cool. Here’s the link to book that in. You’re missing massive opportunity. So with automation, we can solve for all three of these big reasons that you’re not converting at the highest level possible. So again, retargeting, this is just a basic visual, somebody gets to your website, they leave. Now they’re out on on you, Yahoo or they’re on CNN or on ESPN, they see your ad, or they see you on Facebook, and it brings them back to the website. That’s what we want to do with our retargeting. And there’s there’s all kinds of banner size ads, you want to have them all right, and you want to make sure that they’re compelling enough to stand out to make them see it and want to click it and come back in to the fold. And then with automation, the main thing we want to have is when someone fills out the form on your site, that immediately they get a text message, and they get a phone call. And with with automation, we have a system called Conversion amp, we have it set up where the second thing gets filled in, text message goes out, Hey, thanks for contacting Bill’s plumbing did you want to is there something we can help you with? And immediately we’ll call your office and say press one to connect with this customer. And then we’ll call out to them. So we can really have speed to lead? And then beyond that, for the customers maybe that we didn’t answer the call, we can send an immediate text message hey, sorry, we missed your call something we can help you with. Right, and we got a two way text platform where they can engage in a conversation with us. And then for those that don’t convert, we can have automation, just check ins via email, text message, hey, just want to circle back did you get this scheduled, right. And when you do that consistently, and when you do that automatically, you can really see increases in your conversion rates. And so I could talk for a long time about this automation platform. I would highly suggest if you’re interested at all in this that you go to conversion amp.com and schedule a demo, right we’ll walk you through what it is how it works, and how you can leverage this to generate better conversion rates in your in your business. So hopefully, hopefully, that’s that’s been helpful. You know, we talked about the three key marketing strategies. We talked about generating local service ads, we talked about tapping the Google Google ads, and then having retargeting automation to maximize conversion. And of course, if you kind of move up the hierarchy from there, we’re tapping to thumbtack leads, we’re tapping into home advisor and Angie leads. When you put the automation on the back end of those leads, you can convert more of them. You can play the game in a way that gives you a competitive advantage versus the competition because you’re leveraging automation to fall quicker and to follow up more consistently. And then up the hierarchy from there. You know, we’re building your brand and building direct response strategies with social media, Facebook, tik, Tok YouTube. Again, I think you have to really have tapped out Google Ads local service ads have up targeting in place before you really even looking at that as an outcome. So if, if you’d like to chat about how we can help you implement this, I’ll give you that that knob, but you can turn in your plumbing HVAC home service company, you can type let’s chat in the comments, we would love to connect with you on that. Or you can just go to St. Plumber SEO dotnet slash schedule to schedule a time. And this is a complimentary review, we’ll look at your online visibility, we’ll put together a keyword list of the most commonly searched terms in your area, we’ll show a ranking report to show like where you’re ranking organically where you’re not review your Google Ads strategy and show you know where you might be missing the boat. From that we’ll take a look at really all of the elements of your online marketing. And if there’s a fit, great, we’ll show you hey, here’s what we can do. Here’s how we can help. If there’s not, that’s fine, too. You just look at and say hey, I’ve got some ideas that I can go back and implement in my in my business. So if that sounds good, you can go to plumber SEO dotnet slash schedule to book that in, or you can feel free to call us at 866-610-4647. So that’s it. If you have follow up questions, we would love to answer those for you. You can either go into the Facebook group and post them or you can say I got a question here in the chat. Otherwise, that’s it for today.

I hope you guys got value. Hopefully there’s clear takeaways from this that you can go implement. Susan, thank you for being on with us. Thank you for your time. Again 866-610-4647 Where you go to plumber SEO dotnet slash schedule. Awesome. Thanks, guys. Have an amazing afternoon. And I’ll talk to you guys soon

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