The Ultimate Guide to Google Rankings for Carpet Cleaners in 2023

A1. While digital marketing plays a critical role in improving search rankings, it is best to utilize multiple marketing strategies holistically. This can include activities like mailing databases, phone calls, and client reactivation campaigns to maximize your outreach.

John Clendenning [00:00:00]:

This is one of those events where we’re going to be sort of working on our business and learning some some tactics that can help you become the best known cleaner so that you’re going to get that growth in your company and you’re going to be able to ride through, survive and thrive through any economic challenges. Because the best known is the one that makes it out the other end really, really well. Everybody else starts fighting and jockeying for positions. So this is one of those things we’re going to talk about. So if that all sounds good, let’s get into today’s presentation. Welcome to the Carpet Cleaner Success Podcast, a show created to inspire carpet cleaning business owners to build their own thriving residential and commercial cleaning business. Your host, John Clendenning, has built and sold successful cleaning businesses for multiple six figures over his 30 year career and is the founder of Carpet Cleaner Marketing Masters, a digital agency that turns your online marketing into a lead generation machine. Tune in as John shares proven tips, strategies, and expert interviews to help fast track your success in the carpet cleaning industry that’s known cleaner.

John Clendenning [00:01:11]:

So if you’re on the last training or the training, a couple of months ago, we kind of introduced the whole omnipresence marketing system, talking about the best known cleaner, why do you need to be the best known cleaner? What’s the point about being known in and around town as the best? So Grant Cardone, very famous marketer and sales coach and business leader and stuff like that, talks about it’s not actually the most important to be the best, it’s most important to be the best known. But the reason why we’re talking about best known cleaner versus the best is in every realm we know that something that is the best known that people go to that may not be the best. Think of the best known ketchup, think of the best known golf balls and you name it, fishing rods and things like that. The best known is not always the best, right? Being the best known is more important to the growth of your business. Very critical. And as we’re running through these weird economic times that we don’t know, are we going up, are we going down, are we having a soft landing? There are certain industries that are just getting hit hard right now in certain parts of the country and other industries going, I don’t know what you’re talking about. But we do know that consumer debt is rising, unemployment is trying to go up a little bit to try and break the economy, to bring inflation down and all of these things. And it impacts discretionary income.

John Clendenning [00:02:39]:

So these trainings that we do every month are even more important. The blog posts that I write and put out as often as I can every couple of weeks or so on really deep topics on the website, very important. You want to really be working on your business, not in it. You can go to work every day and whether you’re the guy in the truck, whether you’re managing the crews and dropping off area rugs and doing quotes and things like that, general managing your business or actually right hands on in it like I was for years. All of those roles in my 27 years of owning carpet cleaning made service and other businesses. You want to spend a good deal of time working on your business. And this is one of those events where we’re going to be sort of working on our business and learning some tactics that can help you become the best known cleaner, so that you’re going to get that growth in your company and you’re going to be able to ride through, survive and thrive through any economic challenges. Because the best known is the one that makes it out the other end really well.

John Clendenning [00:03:46]:

Everybody else starts fighting and jockeying for positions. So this is one of those things we’re going to talk about. So if that all sounds good, let’s get into today’s presentation. So the title of this was the new SEO formula for carpet cleaners and home service businesses. So before we get started normal housekeeping rules. We’re going to be trying to be through this in about an hour or so, give or take, depending on where we go deep on some things. We’re trying to give you a lot of actionable information and also a lot of sort of strategy and mindset that you need to be thinking about why things are important, what’s changed, what was working two years ago that might be working, that isn’t working now, could be hurting you, things like that. So I want you to turn off your cell phones, unless you’re on your cell phone right now, then turn off all your alerts and stuff like that.

John Clendenning [00:04:35]:

Turn off your Facebooks and your Twitters and Instagrams and TikToks and all that kind of stuff. If you own a home cleaning service business at all and you’re serious about growing your business, this is deep, deep information from not only me, but people that have been in the trenches for decades, right? So you’re dealing with people that have been through recessions twice on my account, 2001, two recession and 8910 recession and stuff like that. So if you’re concerned about that, if that’s coming up there’s, a lot of sort of history leaves clues and we need to work our way through it. We actually grew through the recession and came out the other end stronger and lost a whole bunch of our competitors in the process. And our business doubled on the outside of that. So it was all based on an intention on marketing. One of the reasons why we called the business carpet cleaner marketing masters is you don’t gain a customer unless you market. So you market to get customers.

John Clendenning [00:05:32]:

You market to keep customers, you market to get employees. Everything we do in life is based on that marketing. Latest updates to the Google algorithm. We mentioned what could be hurting the past, could be hurting you in the past, how to optimize the new SEO formula. I know we had a fourth bullet point. Obviously we had a placeholder for it and didn’t get put in here. But yeah, these are the things we’re going to be covering today. All about the way Google now works and why you want to be seen on Google.

John Clendenning [00:06:05]:

So for those of you that are new here, let’s just do this really quickly. Who am I? So I’ve been a career business owner since 1990 while still in high school. Kind of dates me a little bit, tells you a little bit about my age, but I’ve owned service businesses my entire life. I kind of didn’t decide to go down the college route and started working. Did a presentation in senior year of high school where we had to go see the bank just to get brownie points for the presentation. Bank manager was so impressed. Don’t remember the guy’s name. Ray Seed.

John Clendenning [00:06:41]:

He handed my partner, Scott and I, at the time, business partner, the money to actually start a window cleaning business in the summer. Enough money to buy vans and ladders and everything else like that because he was really impressed with our business plan that we had put together because we went deep with it. And that started a journey into entrepreneurship. A couple of years later, Scott went off to college and did other things. I decided not to jump over the side of 40 story buildings and sitting in a little swing stage boson chair, they call it and got down on the ground, started owning janitorial companies and got into the carpet cleaning. World and bought made service businesses, flood restoration and then have worked with franchise networks and everything as a consultant, but also in those environments as well. So I’ve done it all. I’ve lectured around the world, done three day elite retreats to teach people how to deliver a client service experience, how to think of a marketing first mentality.

John Clendenning [00:07:33]:

Why? Because I had to learn it myself. So I’ve invested a couple of hundred thousand dollars to this point in my own marketing training just to run my service businesses. And then people started tapping me on the shoulder and said, hey, you seem to have this marketing thing figured out. Can you help me out on it? And I started doing consulting in the mid 2000s, late two thousand s, and then opened up a digital marketing agency about ten years ago, originally targeting just anybody in my local market. I started speaking for the Chamber of Commerce a couple of times a month for a couple of years and did a lot of local clients and realized, you know what, I like cleaners, I know cleaners. I want to talk to cleaners. And that became carpet cleaner marketing masters, wrote the book Cleaner Guide to Internet Marketing for carpet cleaners. You can get it on Amazon.

John Clendenning [00:08:15]:

Go look it up. Number one book in our space. And I finally sold off all my brick and mortar businesses. The final one in the middle of the pandemic there, 2001. So two years now, I sold it off and generated multiple returns on investment and stuff like that, just because of how omnipresent we were and still are in the local marketplace. You can sell your business for more as well. You’re not selling it for the price of the truck mount and the price of the RX twenty s and wands and equipment and all that kind of stuff. You’re selling it for the impact and the number of leads you have, the number of confirmed customers you have, and all that kind of stuff, and your goodwill.

John Clendenning [00:08:56]:

And the person who bought it went and got an actual small business loan and was able to use the prospectus that we provided to qualify for that loan with very little down, actually. So a little bit else about us, about me cleaning industry leader of the year 2023 this year, on the front cover of Clean Facts interview speak with Jeff Cross and the whole Clean Facts issa crowd on a quite regular basis. And some of these other guys you probably know, mark Sager, Dusty Roberts, Howard Partridge, stuff like that, just big part of the industry and trying to help out as much as possible just as much as those guys do. So that’s what we’re in for. So more importantly is what are our clients and the people we work with and the people we consult with? Think of what we do. The goal is that you want to become the best known cleaner, not just ranking everywhere you want to be seen, everywhere you are. And one of those ways to be seen is SEO. So the question comes from Ross Geller here.

John Clendenning [00:09:59]:

Does SEO even matter anymore? And that’s a really good question. We’ve got local service ads and Facebook ads and Google ads, and we’ve got door hangers and flyers and yard signs and all that stuff. You’ve got wrapped vans, you’ve got connections you’ve made in the local marketplace with strategic partners like carpet stores, interior designers, made services. Hopefully, you’ve got all of those things in place. Does SEO still have a role in 2023 in helping your business grow? So before I answer that question, let’s kind of take one step back about the Omnipresence marketing system and understand the three core principles to see if it has some clues in whether SEO fits in or not. So the three core principles of marketing success and this isn’t just digital marketing, just marketing success in general, growing any sort of business. I don’t care if you’re a carpet cleaner, a roofer, a plumber chiropractor, a plastic surgeon. Three core principles of marketing success are universal principle number one.

John Clendenning [00:11:09]:

You want to maximize your opportunities to generate a lead. And in fact, I like to always put in there a qualified lead. We don’t want just any lead, but we want leads that are our ideal customer type, and we’ve talked about that in other trainings and webinars and stuff like that. But you want to maximize that opportunity to generate a lead. You don’t want to be one of these businesses that we hear from all the time. You know what, I used to use local service ads, right? If you jumped into that early, it worked brilliantly. Under $20 a lead. We got tons of them, and that was great.

John Clendenning [00:11:40]:

And then something started to happen, and the leads started going up to 30 and $40, and the quality disappeared. Now, there’s some games you can play to actually get a better quality, but then all of a sudden, our business suffered. And my question is always, well, why did your business suffer? Well, that was really the only place we’re getting leads, John. Right. Well, what if Google turned that off? What if you got suspended? Well, we’d be out of business, right? So maximizing your opportunities to get a lead means broadly having lots and lots and lots of irons in the fire, having lots of rods, lines in the water, if you’re a fisherman, things like that. You want to make sure that you have more opportunity to catch a fish, get an ideal, qualified prospect. So you need all of those things I talked about. You need to be seen everywhere your ideal customer is possibly looking, so we’re going to talk about where your ideal customer is possibly looking.

John Clendenning [00:12:33]:

And you need to be seen everywhere in a positive, proper light. You need to maximize your brand impressions, because when they SEO, you over and over and over again, that’s part of that. Omnipresence best known cleaner. Who are they going to call when they finally need somebody? Are they going to jump on your radar? Are they going to get your monthly newsletter, print or digital? Are they going to join a contest you’re running? Maybe a free, whole home of cleaning just contest that you’re running on social media? Are they going to do it? Well, they’re going to do that if they know like and trust you. They’re going to hire you if they know like and trust you. They’re going to refer you if they know like and trust SEO, and they’re going to become your referral partners if they know like and trust you. And you can get people to know like and trust you ahead of time with great branding. So Google loves branding online, digital, they love brands these days.

John Clendenning [00:13:29]:

It’s a big part of their algorithm. But you also in your local marketplace. I know stories of businesses, maybe only two and three trucks, carpet cleaners, made services, roofers, whatever. Who rebrand a business? They maybe buy an old business, take it over from their parents, RJ’s Carpet Cleaning, and it was just an R and a J on the side of the van. And then they change it to Healthy Planet Carpet Cleaning or things like that. That’s one example, actually fully wrapped the trucks up, and next thing you know, over the next three months, everybody goes, oh my God, I see you guys everywhere. They didn’t change. They still got three trucks, right? But that branding.

John Clendenning [00:14:04]:

Just driving around, leaving yard signs, door hangers, just being seen back of buses and bus benches and those kinds of things. As you expand, there’s ways that you can become more omnipresent, right, to radio and local TV and billboards. If you’re a half a million, three quarters a million, million dollar year business, you should be doing that in your local marketplace. Because look at the plumbing company that you know is that big? Look at the HVAC company that you know is that big? They are actually doing these things. Look at the lawyers, you know, that are that size. Why are they doing that for brand impressions? Because it helps support all of your other marketing, right? And then you want to maximize your conversions. It’s not good enough to make people aware of you and get in front of your ideal customer. If they come in and leave, they don’t convert.

John Clendenning [00:14:47]:

So a little bit of what we’re going to talk about is conversions here today. It all factors into all of it. But, yeah, we’ve got entire trainings on a lot of this stuff, going way deeper on each one of them. So if we take that in mind and we understand that, for example, this is an average search page for Denver Carpet Cleaning as an example, right? We’re just pulling this up. At the top here is our local service ads. Right below it is the Google Paid ads. Right below that is the Maps listing. And organic, or SEO, doesn’t show up until below that where the websites show up.

John Clendenning [00:15:22]:

So it’s like, yeah, if I’ve got a little bit here and here, do I really need that? And that’s a really good question. The answer is, yeah, you do. 73% of the clicks come from what we like to call the organic zone. So the organic zone is Google Maps. That’s an organic listing. You can’t buy your way into it. You have to influence Google, and there’s a whole bunch of proximity data. We’ll talk a little bit about that because it does kind of fit into the SEO conversation.

John Clendenning [00:15:56]:

But we did an entire training on going deep and just ranking your Google Maps listing and having that figured out. You can go back into our podcast and webinar history on our website under the training library and see that there. There’s one done recently this year, but the first few, you’ve got a listing of websites as well. One thing to understand is what shows up in these websites also includes yelp also includes Angie’s List, like right here, also includes there’s Yelp, Angie’s List, thumbtacks and Home Advisors and all of those kinds of stuff. Why do they show up there? Because they spend millions and millions of dollars a year to rank organically in marketplaces all across Canada, the United States. And why do they do that? Because it works. It drives eyeballs and leads to their platform to then have a lead come to you. So now they have a value because they’re a directory, right? So why wouldn’t you want to be there too? Interesting point, of the 73, 67% of the listings that arrive on Google, and we use Google because Google has about 70% of the search engine audience, maybe even as high as 78, 79%, depending on which stats you look at.

John Clendenning [00:17:13]:

Most people use Google. Everybody else goes somewhere else. So they might use as their search engine, they might use Safari, they might use Bing and Yahoo and things like that. But most people use Google. So we like to talk about Google. So 67% actually hit up the first five listings. So three of them are in the Maps pack, and there’s a little pros and cons about that. And then the next two listings, two to three listings on the organic the websites right below that, that’s where people look the most.

John Clendenning [00:17:50]:

Scrolling down beyond that, the old joke used to be that what’s the best place to hide a dead body? Well, page two of Google, I’ve said that joke far too many times in live presentations for the chamber and stuff over the years. Nowadays, a lot of the scroll just keeps happening. You get to the bottom and it just scrolls farther. Google’s deciding not to have pages that need to flip in a lot of search environments. So kind of makes that joke not quite as relevant. But you get the idea. People don’t scroll down once you’ve got three or four scrolls in you, they’ve found the information they want. So we’re going to be talking about how do you actually show up here in the maps listing as part of your SEO plan? That really is about getting on your website and stuff like that.

John Clendenning [00:18:35]:

So I guess the question now is, do we think that SEO still matters? Are we starting to get a sense that being where the people look, google Maps SEO, that’s called local SEO, and organic SEO, which is the websites, definitely still matters because that’s 73% of the traffic to your website. And if you put in the time and effort, it’s not a pay and you’re in. It is an influence over time. And that’s what we’re going to talk about. What causes that to go up or what can you do to damage it and cause it to go down? And how is that impacting your business? Well, you can impact your business massively by just being the one that shows up for all the different search terms, and there’s thousands of them for all your different services, all the different cities that you target and things like that. That is all critically important. So what I did want to show as an example is one of our clients just recently, to show that on a monthly basis, we run the reports. Where did all your leads come from? Especially from the stuff that we help with and influence.

John Clendenning [00:19:40]:

But still, we just like to know all lead sources. If you notice here, 75% of the leads that came in. These are physical people that started a chat, started, filled out a form on a website, or picked up the phone and called with good call tracking. You know where all of these people come from? 75%, 127 on organic, 89 on Google Maps before they got into it, used to be called GMB. It’s now called Google Business Profile. Same thing, GBP, but paid. Facebook Ads, Google Ads, extensions, content, all that kind of stuff, filled in the rest. But you don’t want to not do paid because there’s a value to that, an ROI, and you land long term clients, but they’re your highest cost lead.

John Clendenning [00:20:25]:

You want to be doing organic because organic takes a while to build up. And it’s just they always like to show or mention the idea that investing in your organic rankings, your SEO, the investment can be static every single month, like the same amount of time, effort, money, if you’re hiring somebody to help you with it, things like that. And over time, it starts slow. And then there’s a point at which it just keeps going up and and up, up and up, and you hit a threshold eventually. But that’s years down the road. You’re just dominating more and more and more. And it’s one of those channels where you should be dominating over time. So it starts off slow, and it almost feels like, is this even worth my time? Only because Google is not trusting you yet.

John Clendenning [00:21:12]:

And we’ll talk about this. You need to enter Google’s algorithm for Google to decide to move you up and move somebody else down in those search terms, right? So to be able to do that, you’re influencing over time. And Google doesn’t just get influenced like that. They’ll let you pay to be in today and all your competitors. That might be why local service ads aren’t working as well for some businesses. There’s ways to influence that as well. And there’s some really strong strategies you can put in place there. It’s not just a set it and forget it like they sell it on, but that’s just part of that traffic.

John Clendenning [00:21:46]:

You want this big crowd, you want to have 75% of your leads coming in from organic as well. And you have to put the time, effort, and thought in. So being here today, or if you’re watching this on replay, this is part of that. Putting in the time, effort so yes, SEO still matters. You can’t rely on paid advertising alone. It’s your most expensive lead. You don’t want to leave it behind. You want to be able to be omnipresent and seen everywhere, but you want to be juggling a bunch of balls.

John Clendenning [00:22:17]:

You want to have cast a wide net. I can continue to use a whole bunch of different metaphors and analogies for this, but you want to make sure that you got lots of lines in the water. There’s another one, but because you want to get leads from everywhere possible. So if one of them starts slowing down a little bit right now, and another one’s picking up, so what, you’re watching the numbers and you’re adjusting, and you’re maintaining that consistent lead flow of new customers, past customers, referral customers, all of that kind of stuff. And that consistent lead flow comes from good marketing, good omnipresence, even to your own database. They see you around and go, yeah, I made a good choice choosing these guys, because I see them everywhere, everybody seems to like them, those kinds of things, if that makes sense. And hopefully I haven’t beaten that one too hard. What I do want to talk about now is some of the biggest changes that have gone on, because there’s things that everybody knew about SEO that have radically changed in the last couple of years and keep changing to this day.

John Clendenning [00:23:17]:

Google updates their algorithm all the time. They want to deliver the best experience to somebody who searches for something they don’t want. You, ah, this Google thing doesn’t work, and going off to do something else. That’s why Google became the number one search engine and owns that 60% to 70% of the search market, or 70% to 80% of the search market, depending on where you look at the numbers, because they’re better at it. They literally just created a better algorithm, and they serve up, more often than not, better information for anything you’re searching for, to the point where you prefer the outcome, and you go back to that search engine. So they change stuff all the time to continue to be competitive and not lose that position. So what are some of the big changes? Detailed and well written content now matters. There used to be a day where you could just put a thin website, a wix website, maybe a whole bunch of spammy backlinks, and you would rank because nobody else was doing it.

John Clendenning [00:24:22]:

In fact, I got my start in digital marketing, just doing affiliate marketing they call it, where you’re basically building websites to get clicks and sell products, or sell digital products and things like that. I learned a little bit about SEO while running cleaning businesses, and this was just a side hustle. I did it in the mid two thousand s and stuff like that. Made pretty good money just as a side thing, built thousands of websites. And then there’s an update that called the Panda update. And Panda basically said, well, the content quality has to be good. You can’t just duplicate a whole bunch of pages. You can’t just have thin, light content and a whole bunch of backlinks and bury things on the page and all these techniques and scams that everybody used to kind of do and some people still do to this day, because Google understands that that’s not a good user experience.

John Clendenning [00:25:13]:

So they figured out what was happening, and they wrote a change in the algorithm to fix that. What they really want is legitimate, authentic content. At the end of the day, Google is just a content engine. That’s all it is. It reads pages. It’s just a reader, and it reads pages, and it decides, based on a bunch of parameters, which page should be shown for the search term based on a bunch of stuff. So detailed, well written content now matters more than ever, and we’ll talk about what constitutes detailed, well written content. Low quality and spammy links pointed back to your website will actually crush your chances of ranking.

John Clendenning [00:25:54]:

You need quality links now. In fact, if you’ve got a lot of low quality links, you need somebody to go and assess all of that for you and do what’s called disavowing them, because you need to tell Google, you know what? That’s not my link. I didn’t do that. I hired some SEO company or somebody tried to spam link me to get me out of the rankings. And all of these links that aren’t mine, that aren’t legitimate, I don’t want you to count them because I can’t get rid of them. So there is a whole movement to disavow links. It happened a couple of years ago, but it should be in your brain that you don’t want links from crappy sources. Ideally, and this is a hard one sometimes for us carpet cleaners and home clendenning services to understand or listen to.

John Clendenning [00:26:36]:

Ideally, you really want a physical office in your target city to rank good in organic maps. So you want a local SEO, as they call it, the maps ranking. Part of that crowd that we talked about, those five spots, five to six spots that get most of the traffic, part of that is the maps listing. And again, we did a whole training on maps specifically, but a lot of carpet cleaners and cleaning businesses, when they’re starting out, you have a service area business. You go into Google, if it’s out of your home, they don’t want you showing the home address. Even nowadays, they’re getting you to walk around and take pictures or do a live stream to show that you actually have a legitimate office with signage and all that kind of stuff. You can get not virtual office, but small offices within a building, within places like that for $300 these days, think about it, is somewhere in that four to six grand a year going to generate you. More than one new customer a month to pay for that location.

John Clendenning [00:27:41]:

If you kind of think you’re at that stage in your business, and it will, it’s worthwhile investment because if you can get an office within about a five to seven mile radius of your best clients in the best city that you want to be in. So if you’re in the small town outside the big city and most of your clients are there, if you can get a small office there, we’ve seen people take like the back warehouse or shipping bay of an industrial strip mall right near a major subdivision of ideal clients. There’s different ways to do it. There’s shared office spaces that are with a central secretary and stuff like that. You get your own office with a placard on it and that’s where you meet customers and you do your emailing and business work and maybe things like that. Before you get to the point of needing office staff and all of that, where you’d move out to somewhere else, then if you can have a physical office, it’s helpful. And if you can’t just keep it in the back of your mind that that is something you should be working towards because you will rank better in the maps and that is impactful to your business and website speed masters as well. So you do want to make sure that the speed of your website is as fast as it can possibly be.

John Clendenning [00:28:54]:

So we’re going to break a couple of these down and just kind of go a little deep on them to understand what we’re talking about. So detailed, well written content. Let’s kind of get into that. So most carpet cleaning companies service 25 to 50 miles. 50 miles, probably a bit of a stretch, but 25 miles or so around your main area. So you should have pages on your website that target each of these areas. But they need to be unique back and there’s got to be a balance. So there’s two things you want to take away from this.

John Clendenning [00:29:28]:

These are writer downers, but you want to have a page for every single one of the cities that you target. Well written about the city, about your services in the city, any involvement, things like that. Because Google is going to know that, oh, hey, ABC Carpet Cleaning has a whole page about doing cleaning services, not just in San Antonio, Texas, but the surrounding communities of San Antonio, Texas. Each one of them has their own page. They must service that area. You’re teaching the algorithm all about that as well. And you want to make them unique because it used to be there’s some website ranking companies that still do this where they’ll grab one page and minus switching two or three words out on it, they generate 500 pages of city and neighborhood content on your website. Google’s caught onto that.

John Clendenning [00:30:24]:

So if you’ve got five pages on your content, about who you are and what you do. And you’ve got 50 pages on your content about these service areas. They’re going to de index those, they’re going to suppress those, that you’re not going to get any credit for that, and in fact, it’s going to harm you. Now, if you’ve got 25, 30 pages of good content about the services, you’ve got blog posts, you’ve got good content. We’ll talk a little bit deeper about that as we go forward as well. Now you’ve got more room to do these city pages because now the balance is looking well as well. So now again, you’re hitting an algorithm, you’re hitting a bot, and you’re thinking your way through this, right? And you want to have unique content about that city, about your services, maybe even tell stories about a client you’ve serviced in that city, things like that. So you can tell case study stories and stuff like that.

John Clendenning [00:31:11]:

You want to be able to sell your visitors on your services, and you want them to contact you. So it can’t just be these useless garbage pages. Content nowadays run like the algorithms and AI are getting so smart that not only can they determine if you wrote it by AI nowadays, so you got to be really careful about that. You don’t want to just be using Chat GPTs or any of these tools just to fill up your website with a bunch of fluff because there is easy ways to detect if it was AI written content or not. But they’re using Google’s deep brain and all these things are way smarter than Chat GPTs. They’ve had them for years longer. And they know how to determine content on your website, whether it’s well written and informative, or whether it is just lean and just trying to be there for ranking. So you actually want a page that holds up, is well read, moves people through it.

John Clendenning [00:32:07]:

So not just a block of content. You’ve got bullets, you got checklists, you’ve got pictures, things like that. You might have a video of the owner, anything that’s going to, oh my God. They engage with it because their engagement counts as well. So that’s the other reason why you want well written content. And every service you offer should have its own page. Google does not rank one page for 20 things google looks at the page, determines by a bunch of technical aspects what the title is up, like the actual coding. It’s called the meta title, the meta description, the headings, the h ones.

John Clendenning [00:32:41]:

And if you remember the days of if you still use Word, Microsoft Word for anything like that, or remember kind of writing stuff in school, the h one headings, h two headings, h three headings, all of those have to be related terms to the topic of this page, google rankings. Google basically is just a topical relevance algorithm and database. So SEO is all about topical relevance. So they want to know that your page is relevant, that your website is relevant, that it all ties together. You’re not kind of going off to left field talking about carpet cleaning and oh, by the way, I sell a sport, nutritional fruit drink. No topical relevance there at all. In fact, it’s going to confuse them enough that that isn’t going to rank. And good chance your main part of your website isn’t going to rank, but it can even get off in the nuances of any individual page.

John Clendenning [00:33:33]:

If you’re trying to say on any one page, oh, by the way, we do carpet cleaning, we do upholstery cleaning, we do this, and you want that one page to rank for everything. It’s never going to you’re going to have a home page that ranks for your core service keyword, and then you’re going to have individual pages on the website that target the actual individual services. A tile and grout page, and a pet urine page, an upholstery cleaning page, an area rug cleaning page, a wood floor cleaning page. Any of those services that you do, if you do ozone, odor, deodorizing, anything like that, you’re going to want pages of those, and you’re going to want these pages to have some people say a minimum of 500 words. We’re finding that to compete, 1000 to 1500 words on the page, well written. You’re going to want to compare against your competitors that are ranking locally and then go broadly, go to bigger cities and see who’s ranking and what that’s all about. There’s really cool tools that you can do, a little bit of keyword research and competitor research, and you want to see what the top five or ten businesses in and around these different markets are doing. And you want to make sure that you’re matching the best.

John Clendenning [00:34:42]:

So it’s okay to spy on competitors, take some lessons from them. So you kind of want to get good at that. So the whole content conversation we’re talking about has been boiled down by Google into something they now call Eat. And they added an extra e because look at even there, this is right from Google’s Search Central blog. So you can go look it up on Google Search Central and it’s all about their adding in December of last year. So we’re coming up to not quite a year ago, they added an additional Eat or an e to the Eat algorithm. This is now their ranking algorithm. This is the way they determine whether your website ranks, whether your content supports the Internet, supports the people that are searching for you or not.

John Clendenning [00:35:28]:

So Eat is very specific, and we’ll kind of walk through why they’ve added this extra e as well. But I just understand that the content on all of your core pages, your home page, your service pages, your service area pages, those are all pages your website needs, even your about us, even if you have case study project sharing, project story pages, things like that. You don’t want to just show before and after pictures. You want to tell stories and match the algorithm. If you do that, it’s supporting your website and you’re creating a lot of on page content that’s growing. If you don’t do that, you wrote a bunch of content for no reason. So you want to really be thinking the way Google is reading. So the new e is for experience.

John Clendenning [00:36:14]:

How much does the creator have firsthand experience in the areas being covered? How the heck does Google know that? How does Google know how the creator of the content has the necessary experience? Well, that’s now becoming the author of the content. So when you’re doing blog posts, you have an author page. You even have one of these things called Gravitars, but you have an author page connected to your LinkedIn. What are you talking about on your LinkedIn? I’m a carpet cleaner. Here’s my carpet cleaning stuff. You joined carpet cleaning groups on social media. They know that you’re in groups talking about carpet cleaning and different things like that. They understand that the creator is a business owner.

John Clendenning [00:36:53]:

They can check you out on manta and places like that. Oh, you want a carpet cleaning business. Wow. You definitely have firsthand experience on the topic, topical relevance on the topic, or you’re a subject matter expert. That helps build some of your authority as well. Now, how much does the creator have expertise, skills, and knowledge? Right. That is all determined as well by posts that are going out and other information and comments. You want to be seen as the authority.

John Clendenning [00:37:24]:

So your website has to be showing all of this stuff. When Google comes to the website, you have topically, relevant content. You’re adding new content on a regular basis. We suggest a blog post a week minimum, one a month. But that just slows down your growth because Google uses content to determine who ranks for what. And if you did one blog post a month, should that be on carpet cleaning area rugs, should that be on? If you service six cities, city number one, city number three, if you’re doing one a month, imagine how long that’s going to take to build up topical relevance about carpet cleaning in city number three, area rug cleaning in city number five, things like that. You want to make sure you’re writing that content. You’re putting it out.

John Clendenning [00:38:09]:

And Google’s going to look around at newswires and press releases and everywhere they possibly can, guest blogs. We’re going to talk about a little bit about link building, but all of this is part of what Google can their algorithm can see as well about you authoritativeness. So what are the reputations of the author and the website and the business? Are they reputable where’s some places? Google is going to know that this now ties into your Google Maps listing your reviews. But if you go look at your Google Maps. It’s called your information panel. You type your business name in into Google, it should pop up an information panel about your business. That’s your Google Maps listing. But a whole bunch of other stuff Google’s found out about you.

John Clendenning [00:38:49]:

Go look at that. They know your Facebook reviews. And it’s not called reviews right now. Facebook changed the name of it, but they are reviews in Facebook and they know your Yelp reviews and your Angie’s list and a bunch of the other places. So should you be on there? Should you be getting reviews on those platforms as well? Because Google, we know Google is looking at all of those. Google loves itself more. So the more reviews you get on Google first, the better. But it should be a mix.

John Clendenning [00:39:19]:

You should be having 60, 40, 70 kind of idea on Google and on other sources as well. Facebook, Better Business Bureau, things like that. And trustworthiness. How accurate, honest, safe, and reliable is the page? Are people coming, reading, sticking around, they’re going to determine trustworthiness on that? Is the content makes sense, that kind of idea. So it’s a little bit of that AI algorithm again, but it’s all tying it all together, as you can see, how your Google Maps listing your reviews from customers, your social media, what’s happening on Facebook and Twitter and people tweeting out about you, any links and any associations and directories that you’re linked on Google’s. Pulling all of that together and making a determination on every page of your website where it fits into this eat algorithm. And then it’s layering on top of that. When people show up, do they bounce or do they stick around? Right? So the new E, for example, is right from Google’s own quality rater guidelines.

John Clendenning [00:40:24]:

Consider the extent to which the content creator has the necessary firsthand life experiences for the topic. So I’ll pause here for a second. Take a screenshot of this. I kind of broke it down a little bit on the last screen, but this is right from Google. So this is the stuff that you need to be thinking about when adding pages to your website. Does your carpet cleaning page match the eat algorithm? Does your upholstery cleaning page match the algorithm? Are you bringing in some reviews about upholstery cleaning onto your upholstery cleaning page with a link back to that review on Google to tie the dots for Google, make them test it. You got another one from Facebook. Somebody gave you a great comment.

John Clendenning [00:41:05]:

And it’s not just a picture of it, it’s actually their text and a link back to that Facebook post about how great you were doing their area rug on the area rug page. Think of in those terms, think of how deep you can go. Because, again, this is not a one and done. This is like, let’s layer this. Do you got FAQs? Do you know what questions people are asking in your space about all the different services you provide and can you give answers to those on the carpet cleaning page, the area rug page, the pet urine page? We know all the questions people ask about these things. Can you give some information, show a little bit about your business, get them to stick around, have a video from the owner saying, hey, thanks SEO much for stopping by. I want to tell you all about our area rug process and the shop that we’ve got set up here, our area rug care studio, or we do it in your home if you don’t have the studio space yet, things like that. Here’s what we do differently.

John Clendenning [00:41:57]:

Here’s why we do it, stuff like that. And check out the page and look for some questions and stuff like that below, right? So if you have any questions, dive down below. So if you’ve got all of that kind of stuff in place, know on these pages that’s what you want to be thinking about. Okay? Number two, irrelevant and low quality links pointed back to your website can actually hurt you. That was part of that penguin update. So we had panda. I don’t know why Google likes their animals. Panda, penguin.

John Clendenning [00:42:31]:

They had a hummingbird update and all kinds of different barnyard animals. But these are as. They’re updating their algorithm over the last couple of years, but they do it all the time. And sometimes there’s these minor updates. Sometimes there’s an entire throw baby out with the bath of water and start again. And it’s a matter of listening to Google. It’s sort of like, I mean, I’m a little bit of an economy nut, and I like listening to Jerome Powell and stuff like that. I know it’s kind of crazy.

John Clendenning [00:42:57]:

And because it’s not the CPI information that comes out, it’s the press conference afterwards and dropping hints, right? Google does the same thing. They don’t tell you straight up. They drop hints of what they’re doing, but they will never tell you what the algorithm is. But they’ll drop hints. Sometimes they drop hints to throw you off. Sometimes they drop hints to give you the right direction. And being an SEO company and a digital marketing company, we tie into some of the world’s best digital marketing agency owners and best SEO tacticians. So our own information and what we’re thinking, plus what hundreds of thousands of other websites are proving happen.

John Clendenning [00:43:37]:

And when the change happens and these ones stop ranking and these ones go up in ranking, there’s some ideas that can be got from that. And then all of a sudden, you adjust. And yeah, I was right. These hints meant this way. And it’s always about being as clean as you possibly can. Try not to be scamming and spamming it, because that’s what they’re catching better and better and better at those scammy. Backlinks before, like we’re talking about here, it used to be all about getting links, but now it’s all about the quality and the relevancy of the links. So you do want people linking back to your website because that’s a vote of confidence that you have good content.

John Clendenning [00:44:15]:

So you want them linking to the home page, but you also want them linking to these blog posts and these case study customer stories. Do you have content that’s linkable first? And do you have people linking back to your website? So you want to actually review your link profile and then have any of those bad links removed if you can or disavowed, right? That is one thing you’re going to want to do. So there’s a lot you can look up YouTube or anywhere else. We’re in a world now where you Google and YouTube to learn stuff and how to generate your own link profile. There’s some tools, some free, some paid tools to generate a full link profile of your website, what backlinks are coming to your website. It’s something we always do with clients and when we’re doing discoveries with clients and to see anything we can help with, stuff like that. It’s just part of the mix because again, you could do a whole bunch of good work, but if you’ve got a whole bunch of spammy links pointing at you, no amount of good work is going to help, right? And you want to make sure you diversify those links and the types of sites they’re on and stuff like that. We’ll get into a little bit of what types of sites are actually good to get links from and how you can go about doing that in a few minutes, minutes here.

John Clendenning [00:45:26]:

So yes, you just want to make sure you know what links are coming to your site, where they’re coming and how to get more of them, and how to get rid of the crappy ones. Again, the real physical office part of this pigeon update, another one of these animals kind of brought that in. If you think about it, Google Maps was designed as driving directions originally. Then they allowed service businesses to come in and then the service businesses all put their address and then they said, wait a minute, that’s out of your house. We don’t want people coming to your house. You’re going to have to make that a service area business. A service area business says google says, I know where you are because I had to verify you. But you’re hiding your address and you’re now telling me you service this big area.

John Clendenning [00:46:07]:

Right. But this other guys right here, and again, carpet cleaner near me search terms like that. Google knows that people are looking for people nearby. So that five to seven mile radius still fits in their map algorithm. So they still know where you are. Doesn’t mean if you say, oh, by the way, I service all of the United States as an example, that you’ll rank all over the united States, you’re still going to only influence a small area. And what we’ve actually found is, for whatever reason, depending on your competitors in the space as well. If you’ve got competitors that have a physical office and you don’t, one of them, again, there’s 27, 28 major ranking factors.

John Clendenning [00:46:48]:

Some of them are more weighted than others. Reviews are weighted pretty heavily, things like that. Proximity is weighted pretty heavily. But there’s all these different points that change all the time. But again, that we determine are the ranking factors. And one of them is based on the fact of whether you have a physical office or not. It’s not hugely weighted if your competitors don’t as well. But if majority of your competitors or part of your competitors do you’ll notice in the search rankings that the ones with an actual office tend to show up higher in the Google Maps listing as well.

John Clendenning [00:47:25]:

And Google Maps ties into your website, SEO, it pulls all the two together. So it does help in a lot of other rankings as well. Your primary address in the local maps listing. What we mean by this is if you search, if you go onto Google right now and just search the name of any town, you’re going to see a little red line, a jinky red line. It’s going to up and down and in and out and around. That is what Google determines is the city limits. Whether it’s right or wrong, that is Google’s determination. And if you see that little red line and you’ve got an office just outside of it, one street outside of it, the wrong side of the street outside of it, google does not think in its algorithm that you live in town, that your business is in town, right? So if somebody types in carpet cleaners near Waco, Texas, and you’re in Waco, Texas but if you actually look at it, this little industrial area we are is actually carpet out.

John Clendenning [00:48:25]:

And you’re slightly outside of proxy, you do not show up in that search as easily as all the other businesses competitors that are within Texas SEO. And for example, say you were a town away from Waco and Waco is your biggest market. It would be better to actually have a physical address near the suburbs. And where your ideal clients come from? Near there. In again, one of those rental offices and something like that. Or the back of $300 a month in a back bay warehouse of shop of some sort or whatever, that kind of idea. Maybe there’s somebody that repairs prosthetic legs and has a bay free that he rents to you, things like that. You can put signage up, all that stuff.

John Clendenning [00:49:14]:

Put a mailbox on the door. You can create sort of a place where you do your area rugs. There’s a desk. Somebody can sit there and answer the phones. We’re in a virtual world, which doesn’t mean we have to, but it is a place where you physically can meet somebody and stuff like that. No different than a lawyer having a remote office in another town where he meets people. That counts as a physical address as well. Right.

John Clendenning [00:49:36]:

So Google understands those kinds of nuances a little bit, but we got to be able to prove it to them. That would be worth thinking about as well. So again, anybody who had a fake address, mailbox, et cetera, ups stores, things like that, and any of those really virtual offices you pay $15 a month for a mail slot, that kind of stuff, you cannot walk through and physically prove that you actually have an office with signage, even if it is just a desk and a computer. In a shared workspace. We live in 2023. Shared workspaces are allowed. But you’ve got to have something that shows that if they ask you to do a physical walk through, you’re still going to pass the mustard. Right.

John Clendenning [00:50:20]:

So work from home and that need to be hidden, and it is just a little strike against you. So anyways, I think I beat that one to death. Enough. Site speed matters. Lots of tools out there that can determine your site speed. This is an easy one because your website needs to load fast on Google sorry, on desktop and on mobile. Right. Because Google knows that 60% of people start a search on mobile.

John Clendenning [00:50:50]:

If you actually go look at your Google Analytics studies and stats, you’ll notice that you probably have an equal distribution of people on mobile devices and people on desktop. It seems weird, we all think everybody’s on mobile, but what they do is they actually start their search there and then when they actually, oh, these guys seem interesting, let me go check them out. Unless they’re just ready to call. Ready to call. They’re doing a little bit more research. They’ll open it up when they get back to the office, or they get home on their laptop on a larger screen to see it better. Right. So if it’s emergency and immediate need, emergency flood restoration, emergency key lock services, things like that.

John Clendenning [00:51:24]:

Yeah, maybe, right. The dog, they came home at the end of the day, the dog crapped all over the carpet, had an anal blowout from eating something in the home while the homeowner wasn’t there, and that’s an emergency. They’re not probably going to their desktop. Right. But most people plan things a little bit farther ahead. You need the site speed, you need to get that going. So you want to check your site speed. One place would be developers, Google.com speed PageSpeed, slashinsights.

John Clendenning [00:51:52]:

So I’ll pause for a second, take a screenshot of that if you want, but you want to double check your site speed. It is one of those things that is why is Google put it in the algorithm. Think of it yourself. Do you like going to a site that if you hey, I want to go learn about this thing. I want to go check out this business, I want to know, read this post, whatever. And then you go to the website and you wait and you wait and it suddenly starts to load. You’re gone, you’re out of there, right? You give it a few seconds, you’re out of there. So it’s sort of like how fast to the first impression and then as you scroll, how things are rolling out that way.

John Clendenning [00:52:29]:

So there’s ways to think about increasing your site speed. Bunch of this is going to be a little techy, but you want to enable compressions, minify your CSS and your JavaScripts and your HTML, reduce, redirects, remove, render blocking, JavaScripts. Again, very techy stuff. What I’m getting at here is like even image optimization. A lot of people upload these massive images. Well, the website trims them down to this side, but the actual image, if you click on it is still massive. Well, that takes a long time to load. You actually want the image to be made smaller and optimized for the size it is.

John Clendenning [00:53:02]:

So if they click on it, it goes no bigger than that. And in the right format, certain formats are better than others. WebP extension versus JPEG versus PNG is actually better knowing these little things. So ultimately, if you build a website, if you do it on sites like Wix and Weebly and GoDaddy and any of these sort of free site builders and stuff like that, a lot of them and other platforms don’t have the tools built in to actually reduce this stuff. If you’re running on a WordPress website, WordPress is pretty much the largest website building platform for companies that build websites and stuff like that. They have plugins and tools that will do all of this. WP, Rocket, Nitropack, there’s a bunch of them that actually will go through the website and help do all of this. And then you can run another test to see how much it caught and if you need any sort of technical help from a web developer to fix some other stuff.

John Clendenning [00:54:08]:

But ultimately, the point is you want to understand that your website speed will be an impact on your rankings as well. Big enough that I put it in those major four listings. So what else has changed? Right, so SEO tactics from two years ago, maybe not as effective anymore. So post Panda, Penguin and Pigeon era, it’s all about the user experience optimization. The user needs to find a page that’s easy to read, easy to follow, not short. I’ve got people go, oh, I just want a little bit of content on my website. No scrolling, none of that. You’ve got maybe, what, 100 words? Nowhere near enough content for the user experience to get anything out of it.

John Clendenning [00:54:52]:

You can’t influence them with your risk reversal guarantees that we talk about. You can’t influence them with why you over anybody else. Who you are, what you do, what people think about you, help answer good, helpful information on blog posts, all that kind of stuff. You can have a short, fast little site that might help the emergency people. We call those landing pages that’s best for pay per click and things like that. When you have a website that is for the people that want to go deep, the people that go to your website want to know a lot more about you. And if they come and they bounce away right away because the user experience is bad, the layout is bad, it’s not telling a story as they roll down. It’s not in an organized fashion, it doesn’t have the right words on it.

John Clendenning [00:55:32]:

It’s not targeting specific keywords on the page. Again, the user doesn’t know that. But Google knows. That’s why I served it up. They came here, they read it, they watched the video, they downloaded the PDF, they did whatever, they engaged with the page. They clicked and went to another page as well that you suggested. For more information about that thing, you might want to learn more about A, B, or C. Yep, I want to learn more about C.

John Clendenning [00:55:52]:

Now they’re on your website for a while. That length of time on Page is actually known by Google as well. And that’s part of this, the click through rate. So how many people see your page being offered by Google and click through? That is your title tag. That title tag actually has to be written in a salesy way. It’s with the keywords in it, but it’s got to be written in a compelling way. Like, think of writing classified ads. I don’t know if you guys ever stayed up till 03:00 in the morning and watched Don Laprie talking about tiny classified ads that will make millions of dollars, because what are you selling? Well, classified ads are a headline and a little blurb of text that needs to cause something to happen.

John Clendenning [00:56:36]:

That’s what your title tag and your meta description is, because that is what shows up when you search in Google for an area rug cleaners near me. There’s going to be a listing of websites and stuff like that. The Google ads are just tiny classified ads. And then when you come down to the websites, you’ve got a headline and a little description. That’s your title tag and your meta description. And again, what causes people to click through? You’ve got to think those out. Does it got the right words in it that Google put you in the listing? Does it fit all the other stuff? But is it also influential? Is it causing more people to click scroll rate and time on page? Are they going boom and jumping out? That’s called your bounce rate right here. So are they actually scrolling? Are they stopping and slowing? Google’s algorithm knows it’s no different than Facebook.

John Clendenning [00:57:24]:

You wonder why Facebook shows you more of one thing and less of another. If you’re scrolling through Facebook and you slow down, they know. They know you slowed down and then sped up. And that gives advertisers when we’re advertising on Facebook for our clients, we know that the algorithm is determining whether somebody slowed down to see that ad and then moved on. That might be a good imaging, but if they didn’t click, we got them to slow down, but we didn’t get a click. So there’s ways to kind of influence, hey, we want more people to slow down and stop things like that. Google does the same thing time on page. They know.

John Clendenning [00:57:59]:

Branding is huge for Google. Google loves brands. Every image you upload to, your Google Places, Google Maps listing, you should be uploading images, you should be creating Google Posts. We’ll talk a little bit about that as well. All part of your SEO, but every image should have your logo on it. Images on your website should be some of them, a lot of them should have a logo on it. Google loves brands and logos, and they see them everywhere, and they can start tying them together to who you are. Oh my God.

John Clendenning [00:58:27]:

All this carpet cleaning content keeps having this logo on now. Now it gets indexed in the image gallery, which ties into everything else as well, and then the number of citations, reviews, and relevant links. That is some of the key ranking factors going on right now. So new SEO formula, figure out what are the most important keywords on your service, service area and the search volumes. This is a few more factors to consider in the flow here. So how do we know what keywords are important? Well, you got to do keyword research, or you got to pay somebody to do keyword research for you, or you got to find somebody or know somebody who does keyword research, because it could be as different, as subtle as carpet cleaning companies versus carpet cleaning services. Carpet cleaning services nationally might get, in the last time I checked, 8910 thousand searches a month. Carpet cleaning companies get 60,000 searches a month nationally.

John Clendenning [00:59:28]:

So what’s your local market like? Right? So did your page target carpet cleaning companies or services as the primary keyword? Title tag, meta tag, h one headings, and throughout the content related terms around that, but really focusing on the term companies versus services as an example. So you want to know the search volumes. So you can use tools like Google keyword tool that’s inside the Google Ad planner, word stream, spy for Google AdWords. You want to set up a great website with unique pages, marketing those keywords, right? And you want supporting pages. So there’s certain pages you can have 1020 supporting pages over time. We call them blog posts that support the carpet cleaning page, that support the city page, that support the area rug page. So as your site grows, you’ve got relevant related content that relates to that service and links into that page. So you’re creating internal linking as well, right? So a page for each service, every city.

John Clendenning [01:00:29]:

And then you can even start talking about neighborhood pages. But again, be very careful. You don’t want to have every city, every neighborhood when the rest of your website is very lean. You want to make sure you keep that balance in mind. Like I mentioned earlier, you want to optimize your website for user experience. We talked about that. You want them to stick on the website. Optimize your website for the SEO, the onsite optimization.

John Clendenning [01:00:51]:

What does that really mean? It means your navigation set up properly. There’s a bunch of technical stuff where you want to make sure that you’ve got links going in the right direction. A page that supports your carpet cleaning page, that’s about that. Maybe it’s maybe a project, maybe it’s a project that you did like before and after pictures and a whole story about Mrs. Jones and her dog Pete all over the coming, you know, to visit for the first time in five years from Europe. Needed to get it all done, tell that story, show the pictures, right? It could be Mary Jones or it doesn’t like, you don’t have to give out all the names, but you can tell the story in the city she was in and the service she got, why she did it. That’s a better page than just a gallery of before and after images. Now you’ve created a nice piece of content.

John Clendenning [01:01:32]:

It’s over 500 words. Go for 750 to 1000 words for that kind of thing. Tell a nice story, what you guys did, what she thought of it, get a review from her or a feedback on a feedback survey. Put that on. Hey. And what did she think? And now it’s your turn. Try it yourself. You can try our services out, blah, blah, blah.

John Clendenning [01:01:50]:

That’s a good page. Well, that page should anchor to and link to your carpet cleaning services because that’s what the page is about, right? And it could also link to the city or the neighborhood that you did it in. So now you’ve got two links inside your website to higher up pages. That is part of the on page optimization stuff that you need to think about and then you need to build out your authority off site and you want to track your results on all of this. So let’s talk a little bit about keywords, because we did mention keywords. Again, I’ll pause here, take a screenshot of this if you want. But carpet cleaning disc carpet cleaning and related terms, right? Words with your city in front or behind them are helpful. People will also add ons, will also use near me.

John Clendenning [01:02:40]:

So they could do San Antonio carpet cleaning near me, right? They might just do carpet cleaning near me. But a lot of people still put the city or the neighborhood, what it’s called by in Manhattan. For example, people don’t type in New York City when they’re looking for something in Manhattan. They type to Manhattan. A lot of times they’ll even go right down, um, Soho and and, you know, upper East Side, Upper West Side, stuff like that, because they know they’re looking for somebody who services definitely in that community, like that neighborhood, right? So some people look for family oriented, green certified Recommended Residential, affordable, Reputable, top Best, top Rated, free estimates, free quotes, all in conjunction with these types of keywords. So this is just sort of like a general starter list. Once you start developing out keywords and all the different options and stuff like that, you’ll realize that there’s thousands of supporting keywords that become part of what we call keyword clusters. So it’s good to know the keyword cluster of a page, the focus keyword, and then the clusters around, because then you can pepper those extra words in.

John Clendenning [01:03:48]:

If you go into Google right now and type in canoli restaurants near me, back in the day, if that website did not have cannoli as blah, blah, blah, google wouldn’t know. What is Google going to show you now? All the Italian restaurants around you, right? Google’s smart enough to go, oh, canoli Italian restaurants near it’s thinking, right? It’s digitally thinking. What do you mean by this? It happens in carpet cleaning and home cleaning services and all that stuff as well. So you got to pay particular attention to the keywords. And you’re not putting all these keywords on one page. Your whole website needs to start ranking for these. But of course, the upholstery cleaning page, the furniture cleaning page, that’s the same page, right? Upholstery cleaning, furniture cleaning, chair cleaning, couch cleaning. But you might know best ways to take care of a Silk Shay’s Lounge.

John Clendenning [01:04:39]:

That is a know blog post, right? How a San Antonio residence saved her silk Shay’s lounge. And then a story about it. Another supporting page for your upholstery cleaning page. See the way that ties together? Hopefully I’m giving you some dropping some nuggets here that you kind of understand. You’ve really got to think deep. It seems like a lot, but if you want to rank organically and dominate and become the best known cleaner, SEO maps and website are a big part of it. So on site optimization, strong website with good content, good user experience. Leverage multimedia to improve the time on page.

John Clendenning [01:05:24]:

Have videos show them people before and afters, and videos and owner videos talking about what they’re doing. A page for each service. Cities and neighborhoods that you serve. Quality content that is well optimized. So thinking technical optimization, but well written and laid out. Well, people don’t like just reading gobs of text, so you’re breaking it up with little checklists or bullet lists and things like that. And headings and subheadings main keyword in the title and the H one and then relevant keywords in those secondary headings, h two S and h three S down the page so that you’re not just saying the same thing over and over again. You’ve read those pages before where it’s like, are you looking for the best titleist golf balls? Well, best titleist golf balls are what we do and we do best.

John Clendenning [01:06:09]:

You read that and go, this is garbage, right? But if you can word it in a way where it fits in naturally, and then the related words around that all are part of those things. Meta description sells the click. That’s what I’m talking about as well. You can put your keywords in, but the meta description, that’s that part again, when you search for something in Google and you look at the websites, you scroll down to the websites, you’ve got the title and then the description, that description needs to sell you on clicking to go into there. So there’s influence, there’s psychology involved in that. So you want to make sure that happens because that’s that click through rate. People are clicking on you now. You’re going to rank a bit better.

John Clendenning [01:06:47]:

Name, address, phone number in the footer with schema, that is, again, a bit of technical term, but you want to make sure if you’ve only got one location, it’s in the footer of your entire website. If you’ve got multiple locations, you have multiple location business. You’ve got two or three offices in different towns around on one website. You don’t want the schema in the footer. You don’t want your name, address, and phone number schemaed in the footer of every page. You want to have actual location pages and a build out around each location in the website as well, because you need to be trying to rank for these multiple offices that have multiple GMB locations and stuff like that. So you want to blog ongoing with weekly updates if you can. Four blog posts a month and one press release a month is a really good pace to generate internal website signals and then a press release, a lot of external signals, ranking signals around the web and that’s.

John Clendenning [01:07:44]:

So a media room is really good to have as well. So we’ve got a unique way that we actually build media rooms so that our clients are actually the media room that sent out the press release that gets picked up by local and national news outlets and radio stations. They just want good content about how to care for something, whatever, but they generate links back to that website, to that media room. So there’s other ways to do it. PR newswire and news, web and routers and things like that, where they’re the media room, but you can pay to send out press releases through them as well. So what does this all look like? Here’s an example. One of our clients as an know carpet cleaning brantford, one of the cities number one in Google Maps, there’s an ad up here. Somebody’s paying because the Home Depot is, mind you, to get an ad.

John Clendenning [01:08:34]:

Try and get an ad in the three pack that’ll only show up every so often. But I wanted to show that that’s the only other way to get in the three pack. And you can’t force it. It’s an algorithm, and you have to add an extension into the you have to be running Google Paid ads, pay per click ads, and then you have to add the extension. And then based on the keyword, they kind of decide maybe they might throw it in or not. But if you rank number one, lots of reviews, getting most of the calls number one organic as well. Why? Because the website has all of those principles baked in. It’s got title tags.

John Clendenning [01:09:07]:

The home page is designed to rank for the main cleaning services. And then inside the services, there’s all individual service pages, individual service area pages, blog posts and press releases and media rooms and ongoing content and stuff like that. And really, really deep. And then a strategy to come back and look at it every three to six months. Right? You want to look at it every three to six months, run another scan of the content, find if there’s some content that isn’t getting any clicks, any rankings. Is there ways to blend content together? Is any content cannibalizing another piece, things like that? Are you trying to target carpet cleaning on five different pages, things like that? You want to make sure that each page has a specific keyword intent and relative keywords. The ones that support it are under it, pointing up to it, even in your URL structure. Elite carpet.

John Clendenning [01:09:57]:

Carpet cleaning in Branford, things like that. You want to make sure that even the URL structure is supporting all of this. So there’s a strategy behind it. Off page. So this is sort of the 80% of what you do for ranking is on page 20% is off page. Roughly speaking, in today’s world, it used to be almost the opposite of that. Everything was about links and off page. But you want to claim and optimize your Google business listing for sure.

John Clendenning [01:10:22]:

Make sure it’s 100%. Respond to all reviews. Don’t leave any review hanging, good, bad, or ugly. You want to respond to reviews. Google sees that as trustworthiness. That’s part of the eeat. They see it, they connect it to the website. All your pieces connect together.

John Clendenning [01:10:35]:

You want to be responding to every one of the reviews. You want to build lots of high quality citations and make sure that your Nap, your name, address, and phone number are consistent. So what’s the citation? It is basically your name, address, and phone number somewhere out on the web, right? Somewhere out on the web that’s reputable high quality. So we can actually talk a little bit about what kind of sources those are. Just in a second here. As we wrap things up. But you want to build lots of real reviews consistently, because that hits that trustworthiness of the Eeat, right? So you don’t necessarily want to have 100 reviews and then get no more. It’d be better to get five or ten a month, right? Check what you keep up with your competitors, but five or ten a month and grow.

John Clendenning [01:11:19]:

Because Google looks at the review velocity as well, not just volume. If you get a whole bunch of once and stop, a good chance some of those, if not a lot of them, start disappearing because it looks like you did pardon me, looks like you did something once and like possibly a scam, and you want to build authoritative and relevant links back to your website. So here’s what these backlinks look like. Pardon me while I take a drink. If your website is getting links from local directories, better Business Bureaus, Chamber of Commerce, your local janitorial supply place, say you got charity events. So you got local citations. You got national citations, and you got niche citations. You’re part of the IRCRC.

John Clendenning [01:12:07]:

You’ve got your link on the Carpet and Rug Institute, and you pay the $25 or $50 a year for whatever it’s gone up to now, things like that. You’re part of the Issa, which is Clean Facts Magazine is all under that the association and those kinds of things, you’re on their website, they’re going to put a link back to your website. Now, those are credible niche links. We’re in the carpet cleaning, home cleaning niche. You want to get links from those national citations are Angie’s List, which is called Angie Now, judy’s Book, Yelp Home Advisor, unfortunately, things like that. But all the other ones as well, there’s Yellow Pages online and all of these kinds of things. Any of the quality ones, you want to make sure there’s about 50, 60 high quality ones, and then a bunch of other ones that you want to be in. But you want to make sure you’ve getting links from all of these places.

John Clendenning [01:12:57]:

You want to make sure in the data aggregators like Dun and Brad Street and Foursquare and stuff like that, because those are all links with quality. Back to your website. If you get the chance to guest blog, you wrote some good content, and somebody wants to share that out on their blog right now, you got a link back to your website. So if you’re writing good content, it’s going to get picked up and things like that. So industry associations, we talked about that, local business groups, better Business Bureau, BNI, Chamber of Commerce, anything like that. Charities, a lot of charities will, hey, thanks for ABC Carpet Cleaning, for sponsoring us, and it’ll be a link back to your website. That’s a backlink. Press releases are great.

John Clendenning [01:13:37]:

If you do one a month, you’re generating 150 signals around the web, digital signals that Google finds all over the place. That all link back to your website, link to your Google Maps listing, tie everything together. So press releases are a great way to do that as well. Vendors, right? Say for example, you buy from a certain janitor supply place or you went to one of their training classes and they put you up on their website. Anywhere you can get quality links like that. Just think of that because you want to even Facebook posts and sharing stuff out and having getting links and stuff like that if somebody else shares it out, if there’s things like that, there’s just lots and lots of places to think about getting links back to your website. So you want to be thinking about it. This is the point we’re trying to make here.

John Clendenning [01:14:21]:

Again, this isn’t all encompassing. Oh my God, John, how am I going to ever have time to clean carpets or run my business if I have to think about all this stuff? No, this is a strategic conversation and you put some time in it. You put two or 3 hours understanding this stuff. You hire somebody to help you with this and then you come back and revisit it every three to six months, right? Is there any other places we can get links? Hey, anytime you do a charity event hey, do you guys have a page on that? Yeah. Can I get my link put on it? Because now you’re thinking about it. One business does that, five others don’t. That one business is the one that gets all the links, right? The kind of idea, if you think about it, if you’re actually actively learning to run your business better and better and better every day, your business is growing. Next year you’re a new year in business and you’ve grown and you’ve expanded.

John Clendenning [01:15:05]:

I’ve talked to businesses that are 20 years in and they’re no different than they were 20 years ago. They just took year one and repeated it 20 times. There’s other businesses that by 20 years in, they’ve reiterated themselves, expanded and grown and into other industries and just gone nuts because they’ve grown their business, learnt more, put it in place, maybe opened a new division, did more of that, whatever, acquired acquisitions and mergers. And 20 years in, they’re in a town of 40,000, 30,000 people and they’re a million dollar business. Because they’re not just carpet cleaning anymore. Now they got a made service, now they got a janitorial, they bought some out, they built some, they own the janitorial supply house. Think of that. There’s other people that are in a million 2 million population and 3 million population and they’re running a million dollar carpet cleaning business or above.

John Clendenning [01:15:50]:

And they’re very focused because there’s more than enough ideal clients for the services. They don’t need to go as wide, right? So there’s ways to play this game, but if you understand the game now, you can grow your business. So this is an example, know, for example, again, Carpet Cleaning Branford, we did this. What’s causing these people to show up? And even this three best rated, which is a directory, what’s causing them to show up? Well, they’ve claimed and verified their maps listing. Had to have or they won’t show up. No spam in the company name. They didn’t try and put in fake names. Right? They can confirm that that is their name if they’re ever asked.

John Clendenning [01:16:29]:

It is actually on their business listing. Lots of online reviews. Keyword is in the title tag of their business, right? So Brantford and Carpet Cleaning, there’s their keywords right, in the title tag. This is the title tag. This is the description. That’s the home page. So as an example, those are things that we see. The website is built out with lots and lots of content and constantly increasing.

John Clendenning [01:16:53]:

I’d say a website for carpet cleaners should start with about 20 pages and within a couple of years should be sitting at 150 pages or more with those weekly blog posts and stuff like that and just good project stories and just really good meaningful content, right? You keep an eye on it. If some of the pages aren’t working, you adjust them, you tweak them, you play with them. That’s just a good content plan. Make it valuable to the people that are going to read it. But it also shows, know how to get a red wine stain out of my carpet? Well, if you’ve got a page on that or a blog post on that eventually, and that person’s in and around the Branford service area, google is going to serve that page up in the search engine results as well. It’s not going to show the map listing because how to get rid of red wine stain sounds more like an intellectual search, right? A research. So they probably won’t show the maps listing because that’s really for people looking for a service and Google’s trying to make that determination. But boom, you’re number one because you’re nearby, you’re close, and you’ve got a well written page that solves that problem as an example.

John Clendenning [01:17:49]:

So solid link profile across the web with consistent SEO work, producing lots of authority signals to your website. So that is what drives results in today’s day and age. So, again, I like to keep these about an hour and 15 minutes. An hour and 20 minutes. We hit the now and 20 minutes mark. So key takeaways, right? Other than the fact that, wow, John, that’s a lot, and I get that. But what are some of the key takeaways? Understanding how this fits into a best known cleaner program. This fits into Omnipresence.

John Clendenning [01:18:21]:

This fits into why you put door hangers out and yard signs and wrapped your Vans and do paid ads and talk to the carpet stores and the interior designers and the real estate agents. This fits into all of that. This is part of that. It anchors all of that. Because now they see you here, they see you there, they see you everywhere. It anchors that, but it also grows your business. Organically over time creates an asset. If you’re ranking everywhere for your search terms and getting most of the traffic, most of the phone calls, most of the volume, when you go to sell your business, guess how much more it’s worth? Because you’re the best known cleaner, you’ve built an asset and you’re not missing any pieces.

John Clendenning [01:19:00]:

SEO thinking in those ways, working on your business more than in it. So here’s some of the key takeaways that we talked about. You can actually even leverage paid search to get some keywords. So if you’re running pay per click campaigns, there’s a reason for those. Again, you’re not going to get volumes of leads. Your best leads are going to come from organic and referrals. And we know all of that. You got your repeat businesses, your organic, your referrals, and then the paid to add in those new clients.

John Clendenning [01:19:31]:

Find those new people that are now you can drip on and get the lifetime value of a customer out of them. It’s never about cleaning them one and done. It’s like, hey, I just ran paid ads. I got ten new clients this week. Eight of them. They’re okay. They’ll probably come back in a year or two, maybe some of them maybe never see us again. Didn’t seem the greatest, but they paid our bill.

John Clendenning [01:19:53]:

They paid maybe just a minimum charge or slightly above. We did the work for them. We did a great job. We got a review. They’re happy. We canvassed the neighborhood with door hangers and we put a yard sign and left it behind, right? That’s great. Two of them are A list clients. They might have only paid a minimum charge this time to try you out the first time.

John Clendenning [01:20:11]:

But they’re on golf course road and they have 40,000. That’d be great. 4000 square foot, 3000 square foot home, all white off white carpet, all off white upholstery area rugs and stuff like that. And they just needed the entranceway cleaned. Right? Now that’s still worth the visit. And you got that from a paid ad as an example, or you got that from your organic rankings or whatever. So you want to make sure with paid ads you can get some of that extra work. Facebook ads, Google ads, local service ads.

John Clendenning [01:20:40]:

But you can also use what keywords are actually driving the most of the traffic and then write content around it. Use that as part of your SEO strategy because now you know those are search terms. Why not start ranking organically for those? For the people that pass by the paid ads, only about 15% of the people stop up there and then 15% to 20% in that top area. We know that 75% of the traffic goes down below, right, and into the maps and the organic listings. So the website listings so you can get some of those search terms and let them pass right by and find you down there where your competitors aren’t. So what are you taking away? I always suggest there’s a magic in threes. Father, Son, Holy Ghost. You name everything that comes in our world that’s in threes.

John Clendenning [01:21:28]:

There is a magic in threes. There’s a magic in setting out three things to do for the day to do your business is before the sale, during the sale, and after the sale. You have three businesses that you run and you need to be thinking about growing in three area is at all times right, things like that. There’s always a magic in threes. So I like to say, what are the three initiatives that you’re going to implement? Are you going to go check your site speed? Are you going to do a content scrape? Are you going to learn about keywords? Are you going to reach out to somebody? What are the three initiatives that you know? Are you going to put more personalized content on your website so they stay longer? What is it? What are the three things you’re going to take away from this webinar and this training on SEO and rankings and the new ways you need to think about that whole content and eat and authority and expertise and all of those things that we just talked about. Is there anything that comes to mind that you’re going to take away? So write those down right now. And while you’re writing that down, just take a moment. Just going to let you know that as we always do, anybody who shows up to these webinars, we have an offer for you at Someday It Will Be Taken Away.

John Clendenning [01:22:32]:

We’re incredibly busy, but I offer from our team a comprehensive marketing audit. We do a deep dive into your website, your competitors, your organic rankings, your SEO, your keywords, your paid ads and stuff like that. And our team, research team that is researching all of our own clients every month, every three months, every six months to adjust our programs and our growth strategies for our clients. That same research team is put to work for you. And then you get on a call with me and we go deep. We talk about a step by step plan. Doesn’t mean we’re selling you our services. We’re talking about a step by step plan that you can grow your business.

John Clendenning [01:23:12]:

I charge $500 an hour to do consulting, and I’ve done that for years. I’ve consulted franchise networks. I’ve consulted businesses in related industries and stuff like that on a regular basis. I get hit up for consulting all the time. I charge $500 an hour. You’re going to get up to an hour of my time, plus this whole comprehensive research all done for you so that we can talk about where do you want to go, where are you right now? Where do you want to go. There’s your gap. How are we going to get there and what’s the fastest way to get there? And some of it is what you’re doing on your own outside of anything.

John Clendenning [01:23:45]:

Digital can show you what the digital piece looks like, but are you also mailing your database? Are you also picking up the phone and calling? Are you checking in with your client, your best clients every three, 6912 months? Are you doing a client reactivation campaign? Things like that? What are all these things? Are you becoming really close friends with business, friends with people that can generate referrals for you, referral for other business owners, and again, those interior designers and carpet stores and real estate agents and made services and all that, and even going outside of that, are you doing that? We’ll talk all about that to see where the lowest hanging fruit is, to grow your business, keep it, survive and thrive during any slowing down of the economy and be the best known cleaner that sticks around. So if that sounds interesting to you, then you can always hit us up. Carpetcleanamarketingmasters.com slash schedule. You’ll book a tentative time in my schedule, and then you’ll hear from Krisha that’s on the call here, she’ll need to get a hold of you first or that appointment doesn’t stick because we need that background information to run the research. So if you’re at all interested, if you’re again listening to this on replay and it’s still available, go check it out, see if it’s there. But we shut that down from time to time when we’re just head down, working on Onboarding and building out some of our new clients that are coming on. Sometimes it comes in waves, like any business, but we’ve got openings right now to have these conversations at least and see if in a future Onboarding, if there’s any room for you, or just can we help you start your journey and maybe you can come back and think about us down the road. So Carpetcleanamarketingmasters.com Schedule is where you’d want to go.

John Clendenning [01:25:27]:

So we’re talking about the best known cleaner. This is part of the series. Hopefully this was valuable. I know it goes a little techy, but some of you got the tech. Some of you went, whoa, that’s way over my head. Understand the fact that all of this is important. Without it, you never have it. You will never rank.

John Clendenning [01:25:42]:

It doesn’t just happen. There is a science and a mathematical precision and an influence in psychology and marketing that causes these things to happen. And when you get it right, it builds an asset for your business that rises like rising tide lifts all ships. You can rise that tide and lift all of the strength of your business over time. If you’re putting this framework in place and thinking about it and having it all tied together properly, it’s not just any one thing, it’s a myriad of things. Working for you. If anybody want to reach out to us, you know where to do it. Carpetcleanamarketingmasters.com Schedule hopefully you found this 90 minutes valuable and we look forward to seeing you on one of the upcoming webinars and be sure to tell your friends, anybody else in the industry to check some of our stuff out the books on Amazon.

John Clendenning [01:26:38]:

You can go to our website and see lots of great training videos in case studies and all kinds of cool stuff. So thanks again for stopping by, appreciate it and we will catch up with you guys next time.