Why SEO, PPC, Social Media, etc. isn't helping your business

[missionjim]

I've been in the digital marketing world a long time. Life has brought me into the restoration industry and I'd like to give back.

First off, no I will not sell you anything. I am starting a restoration business and just want to give back and help other business owners who don't have 10+ years of experience executing digital marketing at a high level. I don't mean I knew what SEO meant 10 years ago type experience. I've been featured in CMO.com, advised Fortune 50 companies, been VP of Marketing of a VC funded startup that hit record growth, etc..

The fact is that most owners of restoration companies, carpet cleaners, or small businesses don't truly understand digital marketing. They spend a lot of money on the latest thing they heard from a buddy who is using and crushing it only to not get the results they were promised.

Why is this?

The answer is simple: Your Conversion Rate

A Conversion Rate is the percentage of people who visit your website and perform an action you deem as a conversion. For most of us, this is a phone call or at the minimum, an appointment/estimate request.

The problem is that most small businesses not only have very bad conversion rates (<1%) but they also don't track them. I'll explain how later and don't worry, it's free as is everything else...

Conversion rates depend on your industry, the intent of the traffic, and then everything about your website. A good conversion rate for emergency services is 25-35%.

Let's do an example with a poorly converting website and a good one targeting water damage. His buddy told him he's spending $3k per month and killing it on PPC in Adwords and is only paying $50 per click from Google Adwords.

Buddy's Restorations:
$3000 per month on Adwords (60 visitors per month)
25% Conversion Rate
They get 15 calls or conversions each month ($3000 budget/$50 PPC * 25% Conversion Rate)
Their cost per lead is $200.

Your Average Restorations:
$3000 per month on Adwords (60 visitors per month)
5% Conversion Rate
You get 3 calls or conversions each month ($3000 budget/$50 PPC * 5% Conversion Rate)
Your cost per lead is $1000.

For one of you, PPC is really working. For the other, not so much. All things being equal, the biggest differentiator is your website's conversion rate.

If you improve it, you can improve your return on all of your marketing and sales initiatives. Double your conversion rate, guess what? You'll get twice the number of leads from SEO, PPC, Adwords, or any other campaign that drives visitors to your website.

How do I even measure my conversion rate you ask?
It's simple. Follow these steps. Videos included:

1. Install Google Analytics on your website if it isn't already (tutorial)
2. Setup Goal tracking for Adwords and Analytics. If these confuse you, hire someone locally or through an outsourcing company like Upwork. Should cost less than $50 - don't let them sell you anything else.
   (tutorial 1 & tutorial 2)
   
3. All done.

Cool So I'm measuring it and it isn't great. How can I improve it?
Awesome! Track your conversion rate for a few weeks to let it even out. Once you do that, you're halfway there. Now that you have a baseline of what your current conversion rate it, make gradual improvements to your website and measure their impact.

I won't write an entire guide on improving your conversion rates as it's been covered 1000s of times on the internet, but the basics:

• Make it easy for visitors to perform the action you want (ex. let them click to call you instead of switching between their browser and dialer trying to remember your number and dial by hand)
• Strong and clear call to action (CTA's) throughout the page
• Mobile friendly
• Social proof (use a live rating/review widget to display recent reviews from real customers)
• High-quality photos around your service (before and after photos work great)
• Clear explanation of what separates your service from others
• Clear bullet points on the high-level things 95% of customers care about (response time, free estimates, guarantees, eco-friendly, etc.). Icon graphics work great here.
• Content that is action-oriented and written for a person that has the problem, not written for an expert in xyz service.

Anyways, that's all I have for you today. I hope this is helpful for you guys and you can apply this to your website & improve the results you're getting.

If you want, you can look at what we do on our site (https://missionrestorations.com). We're doing a minor redesign on each page. As we add/remove elements on each page, we're measuring its impact on our conversion rate. If it improves it, we keep it. If it lowers it, we redesign that element or remove it.

Long story short, you want to measure your website's performance as you do with everything (marketing, operations, carpet cleaning, billing etc.) and work to continuously improve it.

Cheers and let me know if you have any questions. Happy to help where I can

 

[aRandomCarpetCleaner]

Wow, thanks man i really appreciate you giving your expertise here, as someone who is starting out still this is very helpful. also that is a very nice website! i love it! is that a custom coded site or wordpress?

 

[ACP]

SEO is dead. Way better $ spent elsewhere these days.

 

[OxiFreshGuy]

SEO is dead. Way better $ spent elsewhere these days.

Really? SEO is why in our first year we already expanded to a second truck and posting big profits. A lot of guys I know 15 years in the game are sitting around wondering why they don't get any work. Many don't even have a website.

 

[brian3180]

SEO is dead. Way better $ spent elsewhere these days.

Where?

 

[OxiFreshGuy]

I gave Google $1,000 last month. It gave me back $8,000.

 

[mscott89]

Digital marketing is very easy way to increase your business.

Its literally a necessity, all your competitors focus on this, so if you do not you will simply just fall behind.

SEO is never dead as long as the internet exists, it simply changes.

SEO is no longer just "create a few links" "do some nice content" it's literally every aspect of your website and your activities to promote your website and rank better.

 

[Kevin Dumas]

It may seem easy to increase your business popularity through social media because everyone uses social networks and they're not complicated even for kids and the older population, but it's difficult a little if we talk about business accounts. Yes, nobody denies the power of social media, cause with its help we can build brand awareness, develop customer relationships and even make sales directly within social platforms. However we still need some help with all that, that's why I prefer to always read trendy articles about social media updates and how to post and be always interesting to people and https://onlypult.com/blog/how-to-promote-on-tiktok helps in that a lot.

@rob allen
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