0:00
all right well hello and welcome thanks so much for uh joining us on today’s
0:05
session we’re going to be talking all about Google Maps also known as the local three pack or the local map pack
0:13
and what it takes to get ranked on the Google Maps in your service area for your most important autor related
0:19
keywords so getting ranked on Google map pack in your area must be a part of your
0:26
overall internet marketing strategy if you think about how we can really maximize your lead flow via the Internet
0:32
we need to nail the basics like you know we want to have a good website that’s built to convert and then we want to
0:37
make sure that it’s ranking in the maps and the organic listings it’s coming up where your customers and potential
0:43
customers are searching for you and then we want to put some Rocket Fuel behind
0:48
it and you want to be running paid search by putting a retargeting in place so you can reconnect with the people
0:55
that have already been to your website and keep your brand fresh in their minds especially that those that don’t conf
1:00
for this is what we call our digital dominance method this screen that you’re looking at here it’s the big picture to really maximize your lead flow on the
1:06
internet this came together by the way by looking at all the top shops in the nation what they had in common so those
1:13
eight things that were on that slide in January we conducted a your 2024 internet marketing plan Workshop which
1:19
we went over how to set your new financial goals for the year and then work backwards from there to see how
1:25
many new leads per month you’ll need what your average cost per lead is what you would need to have in budget etc etc
1:30
so we talked about SEO on that webinar a little bit also and specifically how to set up your website to rank organically
1:36
and then in February this was our most popular one so far how to get your website to convert they proved that 20
1:42
to 50% of traffic to your website goes unconverted so what is the most latest
1:47
information available on how to get a website to maximize at its very highest so it was in that Workshop now in March
1:54
we produced a 2024 SEO formula does SEO or search in and optimization still
2:01
matter and if so how can you capitalize on the latest strategies So today we’re going deep on Google Maps to be clear
2:08
you don’t just do Google Maps in a vacuum you don’t do any digital marketing in a vacuum you don’t do just
2:14
one thing you do Google Maps as part of your holistic overall strategy to truly maximize your lead flow and if you want
2:20
to go back and access any of these other trainings just reach out to me at info@ aorp seo.com that’s info aorp seo.com
2:30
and I’ll send you any or all three of these valuable trainings and informative workshops so and then we want to make
2:35
sure that we’re leveraging lead automation follow-up software to convert the leads that we get at the highest
2:41
level possible as well as take your one-time customer and leverage email and SMS to turn them into repeat buyers that
2:48
do business with you again and again so some ground rules before we get started please let’s turn off cell phones let’s
2:55
close out our Facebook let’s give this our undivided attention and focus you’ve decided to be here on your stream training to hear what the latest is in
3:01
Google Maps so just get in the Zone close the tab goes out of the other windows and just focus on this directly
3:07
give me one in the comments if you’re good with these rules of engagement Taran one Thanks James appreciate it we
3:13
really want to make this as interactive as possible and other words I want you to walk away from the time that you’re taking out of your valuable day I want
3:20
you to walk away with actionable steps that you can do on your own to improve your Google Map rankings okay so I
3:26
really believe that you understand the way Google Map Pack works you understand what you can do to tweak your Google
3:32
Maps strategy and you start to rank better on maps it’s going to make you a lot of money and the time is well worth
3:39
it we’ve seen phone calls increase between 80% and over 300% once a shop
3:46
lands in the local map pack it’s really crazy it’s across the board is there anybody here that does not understand
3:52
what the local map pack or three pack is does everybody understand what that is so when you do a search Google gives you
3:58
three potentials in the local map pack okay so everybody understands what it is good all right so here’s what we’re
4:03
going to dive into on today’s session we’re going to talk about the latest changes with map listings and like I
4:09
said the Google Maps are constantly changing what used to work before could actually be hurting you today so we’re
4:16
going to talk about what the latest and greatest is okay then we’re going to talk about five things that can actually
4:21
be preventing you from ranking I’ve heard shop owners say hey I used to rank number one for all this stuff and now I
4:26
don’t you know what happened well there are five potential poal things we found that could really be pulling your
4:32
rankings down in Google map so we’re going to show you those and what you need to do to get around them all right and then we’re going to show you our
4:38
proven three-step process for getting ranked in the Google Map Pack and I’m going to share some of my favorite tools
4:44
to systemize and automize the heavy lifting like I said my goal is that you
4:49
walk away from today’s session with some very specific actionable steps that you can take to improve your map pack
4:55
rankings now so before we dive in all the way really quick who am I why should you listen
5:00
I’ve been in the business since 2009 I’m the author of two books the ultimate SEO guide for automotive service businesses
5:06
how to Triple your sales and record time and then triple your sales and grow your business the ultimate internet marketing guide to grow your business online my
5:12
parent company is Advanced Digital Media Services and we are Google’s top ranked SEO company in the State of Florida
5:17
Colorado Utah now and definitely the Caribbean because I like to I’m I’m a diver um we aren’t the biggest company
5:25
by far but what does set us apart is we thought it’d be a really good idea for
5:30
us to rank our company for our own targeted keywords before we went to the marketplace to help shop owners like you
5:36
rank you for your keywords if that makes sense to anyone give me one in the comments and by the way that was my
5:41
wife’s idea she said why don’t we rank ourselves first on Google for our keywords before we go talking to customers about how to rank them for
5:48
theirs that was the smartest thing that we ever did so anyway we have some great resources for you and one of them is the
5:55
top shop podcast where we interview industry leaders in the automotive space B and which is what actually a lot of
6:01
other podcasters do but we do do something different we look for auto repair shop owners that have been in
6:07
business for 10 years or more and interview them why 10 years because research shows that 80% of shops fail
6:14
within the first five years and another 80% of those shops fail in the second five years so an auto repair shop owner
6:20
that’s been in business 10 years or longer has proven that they are successful by standing the test of time
6:26
and their insights and experience are extremely beneficial other shop owners and then I’ll just throw this in too
6:31
it’s not in my notes but there’s a lot of shop owners that are retiring so if anybody listening to this podcast right
6:37
now knows of a shop owner that’s been in business over 10 years please tell them to go to Top Shop podcast and request to
6:43
be an interview guest we my goal is to get a 100 shop owners that are retiring and record their experiences and
6:50
expertise for posterity okay so if you guys can list that are on this workshop with me can help me out with that I’d
6:56
really appreciate it okay next we are the issuer of the golden wrench award recognizing people who have contributed
7:03
greatly to the automotive industry so we look closely at the industry and we saw that there’s a lot of individuals that
7:09
have really dedicated their life to this industry and have contributed significantly and therefore we provide
7:14
the golden wrench award to select individuals that meet our criteria and make it through our selection process you know Mary steel the executive
7:21
director of Automotive Management Institute Cherry Hamilton is on our radar screen the with vision and milaka
7:27
so if you know anybody or you want to nominate yourself or someone else please go to Golden wrench award and you know I’ll toss that link in the chat right
7:34
now a lot of times people work really hard in their careers you know they you know they’re executive directors
7:39
presence of associations or trade groups and you know what they really appreciate the acknowledgement of their
7:45
contributions and this is a great way for us to contribute to the automotive community so I’m going to share with you
7:51
in this Workshop it’s not based on Theory this is based on my experience working with auto repair shops just like
7:57
yours and what’s worked best to get them results so what I’m going to going to go through in this session is I’m going to
8:03
show you live examples and I’m going to show you where they rank and I’m going to show you some results our we also
8:09
belong this isn’t a side I had to throw this into the workshop here we belong to a mastermind group of 250 agency owners
8:16
in North America it’s a very exclusive group and it’s stupidly expensive every single month just for the membership
8:21
dues but we meet in Miami every 3 months and we it’s 250 owners of digital
8:26
marketing companies in every type of Niche imaginable and guess what we all share information and much of the
8:32
information that we have gleaned in this Workshop comes to that Mastermind group that we belong to and we are the only no
8:38
there is one other competitor that we have in this market that’s in that group but there’s only two in the entire United States that are in the automotive
8:44
repair and I think uh before we can even talk about the how about Google Maps we
8:50
need to spend a little bit of time just evaluating does Google Maps still matter and you might wonder that because you’ve
8:56
noticed the search engine results the listings have changed a lot it used to just be the paid listings
9:02
came up before Google Maps and then the organic listings so the question is does it still matter is it even worth
9:08
spending the time is as they say the juice worth the squeeze well here’s what we our Mastermind group and the industry
9:14
has found more than 44% of the clicks and the calls are coming in directly from people clicking on the Google Map
9:20
and I’d love to hear from you when you look for a service maybe not your service maybe you’re looking for a house cleaning service or someone to come
9:26
clean your car do you click on the paid listings at the top do you click on the local service ads or do you click on the
9:32
maps do you click on the organic if you could in the in the chat just put LSA Maps organic or paid in the chat I mean
9:39
when this is just personally when you guys are doing a more popped in here let me those organic organic yep organic
9:46
typically yeah Bonnie organic so anybody else does everyone know what LSA or local service ads are give me a yes or a
9:54
no if you don’t know what a local service ad okay you do Taran you know okay yes yes yes okay good Google has
9:59
denied the auto repair industry these ads but if you own a shop in Florida or California you can take advantage of LSA
10:06
ads as Google is testing the waters in those two states Google’s move things they’re adding to their paid ad products
10:13
by making more money on the paper click but still somehow or another the consumers still want to click on the
10:19
maps they want to see the reviews they want to see where they’re clicking and who they’re calling we see more than 44%
10:26
of the traffic comes through that specific Channel Google Map so yes without question it’s worth the energy
10:32
and attention to really get this dialed in and when you rank in the top three it will make a huge difference on your lead
10:38
flow and your rence so I just want to show you an example of this this is a client we work with in St Petersburg Florida and we track all of our clients
10:45
we track really closely how many visitors are they getting how many calls are they getting where are the calls coming from what are the impacts of the
10:52
different rankings that we generate and so for this client we can see their overall internet marketing strategy they generate 3,257 leads last month via the
10:59
Internet total investment of 4,300 that’s management fees to us and payperclick and everything else but what
11:04
I want to draw your attention to here and yes they get 529 organic and paperclick and 556 from Bing 594 from
11:13
paperclick but what I want to draw your attention to is 140 leads that came in from Google Maps this is a good example
11:19
of when you rank well on maps it’ll generate a lot of leads and calls for your business so give me a yes in the
11:25
comments there if you’d love to get another 140 plus calls per month from Google Maps and remember these are yep
11:31
James yep uh and keep in mind these are people that just searched for your product they just searched for an auto
11:36
repair shop in your city okay and we got Taran you already rank in your area awesome so you want to rank for as many
11:42
keywords as possible the main one Taran that you want to rank for is auto repair shop in your city and then your city
11:47
auto repair shop but I’ll get to that a little further into the thing another example company that we work with in the
11:52
Denver area is man cave and again I’ll get into this deeper into the how but I want you to understand the potential
11:58
here when you rank well in of course it’s not just that one search term right you want to rank for lots of Search
12:03
terms so that was actually tearing in my next paragraph as you can see here 6600
12:08
a marketing investment 1330 leads some from organic some from payperclick but 200 197 from Google Maps can you
12:15
successfully invest in digital marketing and the long-term payoff is the organic leads because 235 from organic 197 from
12:23
Google Maps that’s an additional 432 phone calls that are coming in per month just from those two sources so again I
12:29
show you these kinds of examples just to hammer home the point yes Google Maps really really matter and if you get your
12:35
Google Map listing optimized and you position yourself following the strategies that I’m going to share with you in today’s session it can really
12:41
position you for not just better rankings but really more leads more sales more book jobs for you and for
12:46
your text so I want you to know what I’m going to show you matters and we have a proven model to get the results it’s one
12:53
thing to say okay here’s what you do on Google Maps but it’s another thing to say here’s what we do and here’s the results all right the other thing I want
12:59
to make sure that those examples drive home for you is that you can’t rely on paid search alone a lot of us have
13:05
already been programmed to think well it’s all about paid search well no it’s not remember digital
13:12
marketing is holistic Google’s looking at over 200 different things to rank websites alone so the more that you do
13:19
the better it is and then every single little thing that you do that your competition doesn’t gives you the edge a lot of people just say hey we just got
13:25
to up our payperclick budget or we got to spend more on paid search when the reality is and you’ve seen this in these
13:31
examples the line share of the leads is actually coming from organic search and that’s what you want that’s your goal
13:37
because when you invest in digital marketing you want it to pay you dividends like a bank account or like a stock portfolio year after year and
13:43
that’s exactly what organic does once you really get ranked in that organic then you start getting all that traffic
13:49
and you’ve already invested in it to get it but you keep getting it month after month so it’s a dominate a market you
13:54
want to do payer lead yes you want to be tapping into all those lead resources that are out there but you don’t want to
13:59
rely on just one thing alone you don’t want to sleep on organic and SEO you don’t want to sleep on Google Maps
14:05
there’s more to it than just you know running a paid search or upping your ad budget give me a yes in the comments if
14:10
that makes sense at all to you guys so I’m going to talk about some of the changes just because you know this is
14:16
constantly changing and evolving but then you know we’re going to dive into the howto and really what you want to do
14:22
to get ranked really well the changes over the last let’s call it three to five years is map results dropped from
14:30
seven on the first page to three hence the industry terms local map pack or
14:35
local three pack Google’s now serving paid ads in the map results now if there’s anybody here in this Workshop
14:41
that doesn’t know that this is very important for you to know you can not only purchase paperclick in other words
14:46
be at the very top of the search results through payperclick you can also be in the top of the map results Google local
14:52
service ads are being tested in California and Florida and this is how
14:57
the page has changed over the years years the search results May Vary but the format is LSA PPC map pack and then
15:05
the organic rankings so Google got another paid ad platform stuck at the
15:10
top of the page called LSA right now it is the best bang for the buck for paid
15:16
ads so just thought I’d throw that in there you don’t want to sleep on local service ads I I would say claim your
15:22
local service or set up your local service ads account the average cost per lead is manageable and there’s lots of
15:28
leads coming in through this Channel and the big Trend that we’ve seen is that Google has significantly reduced the
15:33
number of map listings over the last couple of years which is actually it’s good for you guys it’s really a function
15:39
that they’re trying to clean up spam they’re trying to clean up the auto repair companies that set up a bunch of fake listings just for the sake of
15:45
ranking on Google Maps and so I’m going to talk about some of the things that could be hurting you pay attention to this because they’re really cracking
15:51
down in this whole fake listing play things that may have actually really worked well in the past could actually be hurting you and number one you need a
15:58
listing in the real City that you’re trying to rank in so it’s going to be hard for you to rank outside the city
16:04
that you’re in right you have to have a physical location in that City that you’re targeting many have tried spam
16:10
listings in the past which is claiming Google Map listings in the surrounding many have tried spam listings in the
16:17
past and we highly advise against this so they’d go to their aunt’s house or they’d go to their cousin’s house or
16:22
their cousin’s office and set up a map listing there so they had five or six different locations around the area on
16:28
Google gole maps that worked really well around 2010ish but as of today that doesn’t fly so what you want to do is
16:35
make sure that you’ve cleaned up any of those fake listings because they will actually bring you down bring your rankings down it’ll prevent you from
16:41
getting a true listing and ranking well the other thing that could be hurting you is inconsistency and your name
16:47
address and phone number AKA your nap profile I if you ever heard that term before nap it’s name address phone
16:53
number you want to make sure that you’re in all of the major online directory listings but in some cases you get
16:59
listed as one company name on Google but you get listed as a different company name on a different directory and so
17:05
Google scans the web and it’s looking for consistency there’s not a lot of consistency in your thumb print so it’s
17:11
not good for you and so you just want to make sure that you’ve got consistency in the reference to your name your address
17:17
and your phone number across the web Google used to put a lot of emphasis on the directories back a long time ago not
17:23
as much today but it is still 6 or 7% of your total SEO rankings you want to make
17:28
sure that you’re not spamming your company name you’re not spamming your categories and the Google business listings this can work for other type of
17:35
businesses but not othero repair shops as people will click on the map link and they’re and if they’re not taken to your
17:42
shop but to a virtual address it’s disastrous so I think a lot of shops figured that out a long time ago the
17:48
whole thing was to get the digital marketing company that knows what they’re doing that could move the needle and help you set goals from the very
17:54
beginning and show you how to work backwards from there to accomplish your goals that was in that first Workshop
18:00
that we did in January so a virtual offices like Regis a post office box a
18:05
mailboxes Etc Google’s flag all those types of locations and it’s counter to
18:10
what Google’s trying to do they want to service local businesses in the true local service area the other thing that
18:16
could be holding you back is not having enough reviews you know having more reviews in your competition is one of the critical
18:23
ranking factors I’m going to unpack our proven model this is isn’t super fancy stuff but it works extremely well as
18:30
you’ve seen in the examples that I’ve showed as we walk through this the first thing that we want to do is we want to
18:35
claim and optimize our Google business profile this is a free service from Google you want to go to Google business
18:41
profile which used to be called Google my business and you can claim your listing and from there you’ve got lots
18:47
of little things that you can optimize like your images your name the categories that you’re in your service
18:52
area services that you provide they have recently changed the dashboard for the better for businesses because now now
18:59
you can actually link to web pages from Google business profile and if any of you know anything about SEO content is
19:05
King backlinks is Queen you want to make sure that you’ve claimed and fully optimized your Google business profile
19:11
listing so that’s the first thing and by the way less than 3% of businesses have a fully optimized Google business profile second thing you want to do is
19:18
have lots of web references through the major online directories which provide references to your company’s name
19:26
address and phone number on all the public sites that important ones anyway across the internet there are hundreds
19:31
of these typ actually thousands of these types of sites but you want to be listed in those sites with the same name
19:37
address and phone number providing consistency all across the web that way Google says okay this company’s on Google Maps but they’re also listed in
19:43
all these other different places across the web this really helps affect your local SEO number three is you want
19:49
reviews right you know you want to have real reviews from real customers in your true service area I would say all other
19:55
things being equal if you’re there and your competition is there as as well and they’ve claimed their listing and
20:01
they’ve optimized it and they’ve got a lot of citation they’re on a lot of directories and you’ve got lots of
20:06
citations the shop that has the most legitimate reviews from real customers on Google and on other public review
20:12
sites is going to win the day we see it again and again obviously you want to be providing great service you want to
20:18
leverage automation to get reviews from real customers in your real service area I’m going to be sharing some of the
20:24
tools to help you with this as we go so the formula is claiming the listing optimize it correctly get lots of
20:29
directories and citation listings and then build up your public review on public sites so and then number four is
20:36
proper onpage optimization it’s making sure that your website is optimized for
20:42
the cities for the services and for the service area that you serve simple stuff
20:47
actually we’ll dive into this as we go but these are the key things these are the key elements that drive rankings and
20:53
Google resorts on maps if anybody has a question anytime go ahead and toss it in be whatever of your time cognizant of
21:00
your time respectful of your time I want to go through this and get you this information and I want to try to keep it
21:05
45 minutes or under okay all right so the first part I talked about there was claiming your Google business profile
21:10
you must know what your Google business login information is we still get clients all the time they’re like they
21:16
don’t know what their login information is it’s kind of important that you have that whether you’re working with us or you’re working with another company or
21:22
you did it yourself you must have your login credentials so you can log into your Google business profile and you can
21:27
see how it’s set up you can see what photos are being used you can see what questions people are asking you can see
21:34
and respond to your reviews you want to have access to this so that’s kind of Step One how do you log into your Google
21:40
business profile two is you want to make sure that your name as it exists on your
21:45
Google business profile is your actual company name adding keywords to your company name is black hat SEO technique
21:53
and it’ll get you de indexed from Google okay so Bob’s Auto Repair Auto Repair
22:00
Cleveland so we’ve seen people put the major keyword in after their name on their Google business profile and
22:06
usually a competitor or it’s usually it’s a digital marketing agency will report it to Google and they’ll theindex
22:12
that particular website so don’t try it they don’t like that it does work very very well it’ll put you into the Google
22:18
Map Pack like right away but I think they actually check and verify it all now so if you try change your business name it used to work it doesn’t fly
22:25
anymore all right so don’t play games with Google that’s the bottom line and try to stuff additional keywords into your company name unless you change your
22:31
company name legally and you’ve got it listed that way across the web I don’t recommend it all right Jody asked if you
22:37
have multiple locations should you include the name of the city as part of your business name no you are one
22:45
company in multiple different locations we can show you exactly how you can do that oh if you have a location in each
22:51
City no you do not put it in the name Jody it’s geolocation it’s so whatever City that you’re in as long as you’ve
22:57
got a verified Google business profile in that City that’s all you need to do okay because when someone searches for
23:03
an auto repair in that City since you have an actual physical location in that City then you have the chance on getting
23:09
in the local map pack all right be sure to add your web address by the way this will create an important inbound link to
23:16
your domain next use a local number do not use an 800 number this is uh we
23:21
still see this mistake consistently where people are using an 800 number we use a call tracking number on every
23:27
single one of our clients Google business profile so we know exactly how many phone calls are coming in next thing that you want to do your customers
23:33
want to deal with a local business so the whole idea behind the Google Maps is that they’re looking for someone right in their neighborhood so they can call
23:39
on them so don’t use an 800 number use a real local number a local address don’t use the Post Office boxes don’t use the
23:45
UPS Store don’t use a Regis these types of locations can actually cause no no
23:50
these type of locations will cause problems as it relates to optimization and frustrated consumers that click on
23:56
maps and go to a UPS Store instead of your shop you do want to upload as many photos as you can and try to use
24:02
authenticity don’t use stock imagery here use real photos of your text staff
24:09
real pictures of your shop so instead of uploading just an image you want to put your logo on it and you want to attach
24:15
keywords to it so now you’ve got keywords in the image that’s being uploaded onto your Google profile big
24:21
mistake that we see Dyers out there as they just throw photos up on their Google business profile does you
24:26
absolutely no good unless you tag them with keywords and put your logo on them
24:31
Etc these little things that I’m talking about actually make a big difference in the way Google Sees images and what’s on
24:38
your site remember Google is a computer it can’t see images it can only see text
24:43
I say Obviously make sure that you list your hours of operation and the areas that you serve this is Google business
24:50
profile you’ve got a dashboard here and this is the new dashboard this was completely changed some months ago so
24:56
this is where you’re going to do some of the basic optimiz that I’m talking about you’ve got insights where you can see
25:01
who’s getting to your site how many views did you get how many calls are actually coming in from mobile click to
25:07
call the mobile click to call is really important number to keep track of every month you’ve got reviews where you can see all where you can see all the
25:13
reviews and you can respond to those reviews you’ve got messaging where you can communicate back and forth with people if you’ve got that enabled where
25:20
you know someone can communicate with you and then you’ve got photos you want to make sure that you’ve got access to this so that you can double check some
25:26
of these settings you want to make sure that that your listing is verified this is very important and then you want to upload those photos pictures of your
25:33
team pictures of your shop you do that by clicking the photos tab and then clicking on that little image icon a
25:38
best practice would be to save the photos name them with your city and your service area and your company name and
25:44
then upload them with your logo on them to Google Maps people don’t realize to just upload photos you’ve got to put
25:49
information on that photo when you upload it then if you click on the performance tab that tab right there
25:54
you’ll see how many people are accessing your Google business profile and how many calls are coming in from
26:00
your Google business profile so for this client we had they click to call business Google tracks that is an action
26:06
and so that’s where you’re able to track the actual click to calls that are coming in directly from your Google Business listing one other things that
26:13
you can do from a Google Business perspective is update the photos on a consistent basis we see this really
26:19
consistently th people throw some photos up and then that’s it everything which
26:24
is why a digital marketing agency is so important to an auto repair shop or any competitive business is because of the
26:31
consistency in what is done every month adding blogs adding links etc etc adding
26:37
two or three photos per month just to keep fresh content fresh rotation happening on your Google business
26:43
profile is a very good idea also leverage Google posts a lot of people don’t even know to do this Google gives
26:50
you the ability to create posts which could be updates that are happening with your business it could be special offers
26:57
or incentives very very few shops post on their profiles we repurpose our
27:02
clients blogs and we create Snippets for our clients on Google business profile Google loves Google so talk about
27:09
getting a leg up on your competition we post to our clients Google business profile two to four times a month and I think they these things rotate out every
27:15
90 days so like three months later they disappear so you do want to make sure that you’re updating Google posts
27:21
consistently oh okay Taran sounds like you’re on top of things two to five times weekly that is awesome less than
27:28
3% of shops post to their Google business profil so you’re one of those 3% uh and and I think I think two of
27:36
those 3% Taran I think they have digital marketing agencies do it for them so you’re probably in the top 1% oh and by
27:43
the way didn’t you mentioned earlier in this Workshop that you’re already in the Google business profile yep surprise
27:48
surprise are you listed number one you’re in an SEO class awesome okay
27:55
so there’s someone taking decisive action on their digital Market marketing all of the shops that we say see that
28:01
focus on digital are the ones that we see growing and expanding there’s so many things to take care of with a shop
28:08
there’s so many distractions there’s so many things so many moving parts to a successful Shop but you know what it’s
28:13
so much easier when you have more money coming in and the number one way they get more money is through referrals and
28:19
through the internet anyway so the other thing that you’re going to want to do is not just get the review okay you want to
28:25
respond to it okay the good reviews and the bad hopefully you don’t get a lot of bad reviews we have a reviews Gathering
28:32
program that prevents it bad reviews don’t even make it to our clients on the web but you know no one likes bad
28:37
reviews but it does happen anybody can just go on to your Google business profile and leave a review you know we’re going to get some bad reviews
28:42
every now no way around it the important thing is is that we respond and this is very very important and that you respond
28:49
I have videos on the right way to respond you don’t want to get into a tit fortat on Google business profile I
28:56
promise we have a proven method that really works well the best way to avoid negative reviews is to make sure that
29:01
they never end up on the web in the first place like I said we got a program that does that we use a reviews Gathering program that provides a
29:07
straight face a frown and a smile and if the customer chooses the straight face or the frown what looks exactly like a
29:13
Google reviews box with the five star above it you know they’re not actually filling out a Google reviews box it goes
29:18
directly to your email or to your email of choice if they click the smiley face it is actually the Google reviews and
29:25
stars and comments box and it posts directly to Google or whatever reviews platform that you want this way you
29:30
avoid the negative reviews and you’re able to deal with them before they ever even make it to the web and I suggest that you use a reviews Gathering program
29:37
like that um now this isn’t going to like I said it’s not going to stop someone from going to your Google reviews profile and leaving a review but
29:43
it will stop the customers that you send the review requests to from leaving a bad review and if you’re not using a
29:50
reviews Gathering software program here are the statistics shops that use one are
29:55
33% more successful in getting reviews in shops that just ask a customer hey
30:00
would you leave a review you sure bye as soon as they walk out the door that’s it so you guys are running a shop you don’t
30:05
have time to be doing all this followup you know making sure that you get the reviews that’s why a computer program
30:11
needs to do it for you give me a one in the comments if this makes sense to you and also if you’d like more reviews
30:16
about our reviews Gathering program just type in reviews in the chat here is a tip that very few people know in the
30:21
industry this may be worth your time on this workshop alog together you can be creative trying to get them to write
30:28
keywords in your review a lot of most people don’t know this but if the actual
30:33
keyword is in the review Google sees it so if you have a good customer you know ask them to type in something to the
30:39
effect of Joe’s is the best auto repair shop in Cleveland best auto repair shop
30:44
auto repair shop Cleveland best repair shop Cleveland you see how many keywords are just in that one little teeny
30:49
sentence into their review and now you have those keywords in your review now you can’t control what the customer
30:55
types in unless they’re friends or you know you got a really good report with them but here’s the other side to this
31:00
little trick when you respond to the reviews you can type keywords into the
31:06
review okay so hey thank you for your kind review we’ve tried to be the best
31:11
auto repair shop in blank for since we’ve been at business whatever be creative but your top Search terms are
31:19
always usually industry city city industry all right the other cool thing
31:24
that a lot of people don’t take advantage of is questions and answers people people can ask questions right within your Google business profile
31:31
obviously if they ask questions you want to respond to those but something that we’re testing out and I think it’s a good idea that you guys might want to
31:37
think about is doing is seeding some of your own questions right you know like what services do you offer oh we do
31:43
breaks we do AC we do this we do the other what areas do you serve we serve this city that City you know Boom Boom
31:49
Boom come up with like three to five or six questions or 10 questions and place them in your Google Business listing the
31:55
questions you you guys get answered all the time you know you’re always asked all the time get those in your Google business profile also by the way less
32:02
than I think it’s 3.5% or 2.4% of businesses have a fully optimized Google
32:08
business profile so this is a great way again to give more context to your Google Business listing get yourself
32:14
ranked in a wider area for more of your keywords that are you know the most important to you um you get with your
32:19
digital marketing agency to find out what those are don’t guess what your keywords are guessing costs a lot of
32:25
money I’m hoping that you can see that maximizing Google business profile 100% will give you a serious advantage over
32:31
your competitors very few shops like I said less than I think it’s less than 3% of a fully maximize a Google business
32:37
profile listing so that’s step one we want to claim our and optimize our Google Business listing see teren she do
32:43
you know of a way to encourage people to ask questions good question I’d have to run that one by my team I like that you
32:49
got some good questions here step number two is uh we want to build up those citations we want to build up the
32:54
references of our company’s name address and phone number across the internet and there’s like three critical parts of
33:00
this you know more is better we want lots of citations we want the main ones like Google Apple Yahoo you know a map
33:08
quest etc etc you the ones that everyone knows but we also want the second tier directories the ones that might not come
33:14
up to the top you know of your head there are literally thousands of online directories and there’s prominent ones
33:20
we always focus on the top 150 domain Authority directories for all of our clients that’s what we get them started
33:26
with is the 150 but then you got the local directories you know local to your service area you want to be in those and
33:31
then there are industry specific directories there are all kinds of directories out there you want to be listed in those you want more citations
33:37
over time like I said we put up our clients on on 150 and then we focus on the industry specific ones and by the
33:44
way those industry specific ones are the ones that move the needle the most okay I got a list of them coming up here in
33:49
this Workshop in a few minutes uh number three is you want to make sure that you’ve got the consistency I don’t want
33:54
to repeat too much we decided in advance what your company name is going to be what’s going to be your address you know
34:00
how’s that address going to be listed is it going to be Southwest spelled out or is it just going to bew just decide what
34:07
that is going to look like across the internet and then your phone number that local phone number you want to use the
34:13
same phone number and I do recommend using a tracking number that way you can track the number of calls coming in
34:18
across the web from those citations so whoever said that they had multiple locations you really want to make sure
34:24
you have a local phone number for each location okay and that there’s a tracking tag on it so you can track
34:30
every single phone call that comes in number one is not to have a dozen numbers not a different number for each of the different listings that you have
34:36
it’s one number across all of them and then number four is we want to limit duplication in invalid information this
34:43
is a big gotcha like if you get listed three times on Google with slight differences in your company name or
34:48
slight differences in your address it’s going to cause problems if you’ve got lots of duplicate listings with fragmented information about you or your
34:55
company on those second tier and third tier directory sites it’s going to have a negative impact on your ability to
35:00
rank so let me toss this in also I should have put this in this Workshop you don’t have to do anything to get on
35:06
these directories if you pay an electric bill people sell information like companies sell your information to any
35:12
Tom thicker hairy that comes along okay and then this information gets out there on the web that’s why it’s really good
35:18
that you have either someone on your staff that’s dedicated to just this so they can make sure because this is one
35:25
of an important ranking factor for local SEO and for Google Map Packs so you’ve got to really take a look at a report
35:31
and see what where you’re at right now it’s really important by the way I got a free place that you can do that with we
35:37
found a good link it’s on through bright Lo I’ll give you that link in here in just a couple minutes so we want to have lots of listings but we also want to be
35:43
consistent with how reference and like I said the ones that you didn’t actually get listed on yourself by purpose you
35:50
were listed by default those are the ones 99.9% of the time that have problems and inconsistencies in them so
35:56
you don’t have to do anything and you can get all kinds of inconsistencies and directories on the internet and you don’t even know it unless you run a
36:02
report and you know and take a look so how would you like a shortcut on how to make this just a little easier like
36:08
obviously going to hundreds of directories and putting in your name address and phone number is a little bit complicated and very timec consuming
36:15
just put shortcut in the chat if you’d like some shortcuts okay uh ways uh to automate
36:22
this a little bit make this a little bit easier okay good I got a shortcut shortcut all right no problem all right
36:27
so one shortcut is to add yourself to the main data aggregators so I don’t think I have a link to this page so if
36:33
you want to take your phone take a picture of this page there’s five of them and there’s citation services and
36:39
then there’s direct data aggregators what you’re looking at are the five major data aggregators and data
36:45
aggregators are the sites that basically House business information and a lot of times personal information like the
36:51
contact details of the business or even individuals and they push that out to
36:56
lots and lots of sites Google Yelp Angie you name it so the five main ones are four square data axle Newar YP Network
37:04
which is Yellow Page Network and then GPS network if you want to be in control of your company’s name address and phone number and how it’s being distributed
37:10
across the internet you want to make sure that you’re on all five of these data aggregators and you need to renew
37:15
them every single year whoever it is that you work with has put you into these data aggregators and has control
37:22
to say no that’s not your company name that’s not your valid email address that’s not how you want to be reference
37:27
on the internet you make sure that you have control of this okay all the other directories require manual updating
37:33
these five you enter your information and they push out the information to hundreds of other directories now if you
37:39
haven’t claimed your data aggregators there’s a cost associated with these and like I said you need to update it you
37:45
need to renew it anually if you haven’t properly set these up and controlled of what’s being listed on them your
37:51
information is going to be incorrect across the web we’ve never had a person that come to us that they didn’t have
37:56
incorrect information across the web if your information is incorrect across the web it’s going to spawn what they call
38:01
duplicates it’s going to spawn incorrect listings it’s going to spawn fragmentation which will ultimately
38:07
result in poor Google Map ranking so give me a one if this makes sense to you or if this is new give me a one if this
38:12
is new information for you for being on these data aggregators this one’s really really important now some really cool
38:18
citation tools that will help you with this process I recommend again claim yourself in the data aggregators spend
38:24
the money or invest in a company like ours or the one that you’re current working with in fact if the one they
38:29
currently working with hasn’t given you this information we suggest you do some research you want to get this dialed in
38:35
and invest on your behalf and there’s tools that will push you out to the most important directories some ask about yex
38:42
and I know they’re like the 500 lb gorilla in this space and not everybody
38:47
loves yex including me if you haven’t heard of yex let me warn you you have to pay them a grand a year for the rest of
38:54
your life if you ever leave yex they will revert you back day one so you can
38:59
be with them for 10 years pay them 10 grand and you say I’m not going to you guys use you guys anymore they will take
39:05
you back 10 years ago and they will put you right exactly where you were at don’t do it it needs to be done manually
39:12
okay you need to be in control of this you need to be done doing these directories manually all of the
39:18
directories if we have our clients on 300 different directories they all have the same username and password for all
39:24
300 okay so that so you have control of that e build your own list or you can use bright local or white spark and you
39:31
need to learn the software it’s a new software program and set up your account they’ll also help you with the data aggregators and they’ll help you find
39:38
additional directory sources just a word of warning here they charge for each directory listing and they don’t do any
39:44
followup you have to do the follow-up so in other words they do the super stupidly simple stuff and then if
39:50
there’s any followup to get the directory to go live because going onto a directory entering your name address
39:55
and a phone number that’s just the start then you got to make sure that it goes live and that’s where the babysitting comes in involved in so if you’ve got
40:01
the time to do that have at it this will help by the way with your whole citation play it’ll help you find in
40:07
consistencies it’ll help you find third tier or second tier listings that you can add yourself to again is going to
40:12
help you in your directory listings I try to get a technical the fact is you want to get this done and you want to
40:18
optimize your opportunities to rank in Google Maps these are the things you want to think about and you want to know
40:23
about and you can choose to run down this path on your own or you can hire a company like ours or you know get with
40:30
your current company just get it done I got a free resource here go to this this is right local go to that link and type
40:36
in the name of your business it’ll find your Google business profile listing and it’ll do a scan and it’ll give you a
40:42
health score if your score is below 85 call us or call another company okay 85
40:48
is a B+ you want to be in the 90s but you know you guys know how it works you remember when you went to school this
40:53
program what it’ll do it’ll scan the internet and it’ll tell you how inconsistent or consistent you are on your listings so it’s a free way to get
41:00
an audit of how you’re sitting in the listings and sometimes this is a problem sometimes it’s not but you do want to
41:05
know about it okay so go ahead and use that resource all right now citation best practices here the key things that we want to take away from this Workshop
41:12
manually claim your Google Business listing there are just a few that we recommend that you be sure to get your
41:18
shop on but if you really want a full comprehensive list you can go to autor repair seo.com citations here you will
41:25
have a more comprehensive list now there’s I forgot how many are on there I forgot what we’re up to like 75 or
41:32
something but if you go to that link all 75 that we recommend that you get on there’s a link to those directories
41:39
every single one of them if you have the time to sit at the computer and figure out how to form your own account and everything go to that link and there’s a
41:45
whole bunch of them on there you can get started with okay so back to reviews really quick after the service is
41:50
completed say it was a great to serve you today thank you we really appreciate your business just so you know you’re
41:56
going to get a review request here in a couple of minutes on your cell phone we always train all of our shops to do this
42:01
because we set a goal how many reviews are we going to be getting each month this month we set those goals and then
42:06
we meet you know each month with our clients to make sure to see where we’re at either up down or right on target you
42:12
know just tell them hey would would mean a lot to us if you could click that review button so you want there’s two
42:17
types of reviews you want to get when they’re standing right there in the shop and then you want to have the reviews automation so if they don’t leave the
42:24
review in front of your CSR and make sure that they get that review platform
42:29
if there’s one thing I found that has a bigger impact than anything in our our client ability to get online reviews
42:37
it’s that they baked this into their company culture which means when you meet with your employees your team on a
42:44
weekly or monthly basis your monthly huddles whatever you guys do you’re teaching them you’re training them
42:50
you’re bringing them up to speed on what’s going on in your meetings announce what the reviews goal for the month was and you know and where you’re
42:56
at and what your average star rating is you really got to bring this to the Forefront so most shops do have a monthly or weekly huddle some of them
43:03
call it and this is an important part of your huddle and if you do that you make that a part of the way that you operate
43:08
you’re going to get more reviews and it’s going to be more consistent and of course your clients are going to be
43:14
getting a better experience as well again once again auto repair shops that are using a reviews Gathering software
43:20
program like we have autoshop amp that automates the entire review Gathering process it helps you get a lot more
43:26
reviews remember statistics show a 300% increase in reviews from shops that use an automated review Gathering program
43:32
and then like I said ours has a system built in they keeps negative reviews from ever making it to the web in the
43:38
first place if you get a person who’s unhappy it goes into your inbox so once again if you’re interested in that just
43:44
type in reviews platform in the chat and we’ll get back to you on that okay if
43:50
you took away one or two things maybe just in the way that you think about reviews or in kind of what you could do
43:56
to generate more reviews from your clients that we talked about here I hope this has helped all right our reviews Gathering automation software program
44:03
will Skyrocket the amount of uh people that you get 33% please keep this in mind whether you use ours use somebody’s
44:10
okay it’s very very very successful the research they proven again and again again this research came in I think
44:17
about six months ago where they researched over I think it was 5,000 companies and the ones that used the
44:22
review Gathering program had 33% more reviews it was a pretty big research that they did here’s your hot tip for
44:28
the day you know getting your customers to infuse their reviews with keywords can be challenging but it is one of the
44:35
most effective ways of getting ranked in Google Maps fast instead of you using
44:40
black hat like trying to put a keyword in your company name on your Google business profile which does work
44:46
exceedingly well if you can slick it past Google for a while they will in de-index you so if you got any really good customers or friends ask them to
44:53
put those keywords in their review but if you’re consistently responding to the
44:58
reviews as they come in with intelligent responses that also Infuse your keywords
45:03
you’re going to have a better footprint across the internet and this one thing alone can beat your competitors and get
45:09
you ranked in the local map pack and if you’re in the map pack now and you’re L rank number three and number two well
45:14
guess where you want to be number one and you want do you want to be number one for one of your keywords or all of
45:20
your keywords so you obviously you know the answer to that one give me a one in the comments if this makes sense if
45:26
you’re like clear I could tap into that 10 times Advantage okay uh so don’t sleep on that I promise you this one
45:33
thing and this Workshop can make the biggest biggest difference okay so Step One is we want to make sure that we’ve claimed and optimized Google Business
45:40
listing step two we want to have lots of citations and consistency in our name address and phone number three we want
45:45
to have lots of Google reviews get lots of reviews by using an automated program that will stop the negative reviews from
45:51
making it to the web in the first place four you want to you know build authoritative links back to your website
45:56
from other websites and as I said in the beginning of the workshop I have training that unpacks what you need to
46:01
do on your website in order to make sure that it’s optimized for the search engines I’m going to give you a very
46:08
brief overview of this okay if you want more details on SEO and how to optimize
46:13
your website the content on your site the links the citations you know definitely reach out to us we can
46:18
provide you an analysis of your online visibility we can do a custom keyword list for you we’re going to give you a
46:23
keyword list here in a minute by the way it’s a free resource so you can get a look at what the the most search for
46:28
keywords are in your industry Nationwide we can provide you a rankings report to show you exactly where you’re currently
46:33
ranking we can give you a report where you’re at currently with your online directories and listings also I’ll take
46:38
a look at your reviews and your social media presence and then what is your website’s conversion rate what is your
46:45
website’s current effective conversion rate just go to autore repair seo.com schedule pick a time that’s convenient
46:52
for your calendar and we’ll do something what we call a discovery call we’re not a fit for all companies so we do the
46:57
quick Discovery call to see if we you know are good fit for each other that that’s how we do it anyway so we want to
47:02
optimize our keywords into the title tags and the H1 tags and The Meta descriptions and if you don’t understand
47:08
what I just said set up the discovery call and we’ll make sure that you understand it it’s not difficult once
47:14
it’s explained to you and you understand its importance want to make sure to get that name address phone number in the footer of your website you want to make
47:21
sure that we’re putting out new content on a consistent basis putting out blog updates make sure those blog upates are
47:27
syndicated and pushed out to you know 5 10 15 different social media platforms we use 10 you want to make sure that the
47:33
website loads quickly this actually does have a huge impact on your Google Business rankings as well websites need
47:40
to load in less than 3 seconds or less if you’d like to find out how many seconds your website loads well got to we we can give you a report and show you
47:47
and then remember 3 seconds or less on mobile if your website is not loading in 3 seconds or less it is affecting your
47:53
rankings guaranteed we’re in a mobile world and then of course we can’t sleep on off-page of factors like what’s
47:59
happening off the website that has an impact as well like building up links having a strategic approach to Syndicate
48:05
the content I’m not going to go deep here but you know we’ve rolled out something over the last 24 months that’s made a huge impact on our ability to get
48:12
clients ranked is signal generation which is basically taking you know the blogs that we create instead of just
48:18
having them on the website that we Syndicate that to local news sites all the social media sites Google business
48:23
profile it sends massive amounts of signals back to that particular website
48:28
so when someone does a search for an auto repair shop in your city Google sees all these signals okay another free resource I’ve got for you the ultimate
48:35
internet marketing checklist for automotive repair and service companies this is a comprehensive checklist and I
48:43
want to give you guys access to it we’ve analyzed hundreds of companies over a one-year period some of them have 6 to
48:49
12 locations all the way up to the one that we researched has 270 locations
48:55
many of you know who I’m talking about what do they all have in common as far as their website and digital marketing
49:01
is concerned it’s on this list all you got to do is download it go over it just
49:06
check off everything that you know that you’ve got nailed down anything that you can’t check off here guess what that’s
49:12
your to-do list for your digital marketing for your shop so I’m going to hand it to you on a silver platter go and download that give me one in the
49:19
comments if you think this will benefit your shop James got a one anybody else think this might help him Bonnie
49:24
thanks anybody else think this list might give him a give him a little give him a little help take this list
49:30
download it and put it on your desktop and so that’s it I’ve given you examples I’ve given you real word case studies
49:35
I’ve given you a step by step that this is exactly what you need to do on your website on your Google to rank really
49:41
well hopefully you’ve got you need I’m going to give you the link to the checklist here in a second oh you we
49:47
already got it if you’re like most auto repair companies you like to understand how this works you’ve tried it but
49:52
you’ve been through the ringer you’ve hired one of these companies that promis to get your results on the internet on Google specifically and it didn’t work
49:59
and maybe you hired the Kid Next Door maybe you tried to do this stuff yourself but you just haven’t gotten the
50:04
results so what I want to do is offer you a free evaluation I mentioned it earlier because let’s face it you
50:09
shouldn’t be doing this yourself most of you guys will agree that you shouldn’t be doing this stuff you need to understand how it works you know we’re
50:15
truly in the education business you know and any digital marketing company that you work with that should be their focus
50:21
you need to understand on why it’s working currently but ultimately you need to find somebody that can do this
50:27
for you somebody that can understand how to claim manage and optimize that has proven results our staff of 26 there’s
50:33
11 different departments to get this right and they all got to work in unison so same thing with the shop how many
50:38
things do you guys got to get to do to run a successful auto repair shop how many different moving Parts have got to
50:44
have all got to you know click together so to get the most out of our time together I would like to encourage you to do that Discovery session with us we
50:50
don’t like I said we don’t work with every shop we do a quick Discovery call to see what your goals are and whether we feel we can help and if we can we’ll
50:56
schedule a deep dive a digital strategy now that deep dive digital strategy we take your top two to three competitors
51:02
and compare your digital presence to theirs so talk about being enlightened you will know more about your
51:08
competitor’s web presence than they do guaranteed and by the way before you get with any digital marketing company they
51:14
should do that competitor analysis so you see everything blogs backlinks domain Authority how many referring
51:21
domains etc etc we’re also going to run a keyword list for you and show you exactly what the most important keywords
51:26
are and how you’re ranking on Google and Bing and then it walk we’ll walk you through the entire good or bad or indiffer we will show you what you’re
51:32
doing well and where there’s room for improvement if any we only work with one company in each Major Market if you
51:38
happen to be in one of the markets that we already have a client unfortunately we will not be able to work with you that’s just the way it is anyway so go
51:44
ahead and apply for the strategy session and then if you’d like to guide to Google Maps there’s a marketing chck
51:50
everything that we went over in this Workshop is on that checklist so if you want to download that checklist you
51:56
you’ll have it there someone asked can we get a recording of this it’s a bit information David yeah yeah I know I’m
52:03
sorry uh these do take a long time for me to put together and I want to put as much information in them as I can and
52:09
yes all the participants that register for this Workshop will get a replay page you’ll get a link it’ll be next week
52:15
because it takes us a while to edit this but you’ll get a replay link where you can go over it at your leisure and you
52:22
can focus on these one at a time but David Bonnie everybody that’s in this uh we got quite a few in this particular
52:28
Workshop please download these free resources it really took us a long time
52:33
to get this put together especially that digital marketing checklist it’s a phenomenal checklist oh by the way yeah
52:39
let’s go ahead to that one too if you want that ultimate uh checklist which will walk you through all the things that the fastest growing companies the
52:46
fastest growing auto repair shops in North America are utilizing go to that checklist and get that I’d love to hear
52:52
what some of your takeaways you know what are some of the things that you took away from this session you can either unmute yourself or just put it in
52:58
chat if there’s anything that you specifically got out of this I’d really appreciate it David a big thank you
53:04
fascinating and scary so little behind the SEO game look
53:11
uh he David or anybody else listening me trying to do my job and do run an auto
53:18
repair shop would be like me coming to your shop and trying to run your auto repair shop you trying to do your
53:24
digital marketing is like you the owner of your shop coming and I I’ll switch seats with you you run my company so
53:30
it’s we both have really a lot of moving Parts type business so I can’t emphasize enough the information we get from our
53:37
Mastermind group that we’re able to bring to our clients it’s it’s absolutely worth every penny that we invest so if you have follow-up
53:43
questions it’s been a pleasure I I I do thank you very much for you taking your time and I hope you got value out of
53:49
today’s sessions if you have any followup questions feel free to reach out to me if you’d like to schedule a
53:54
time go to auto repair SEO schedule if there’s any of the resources I talked about today that you’d like to go back
54:00
and reference feel free to reach out uh we’ve got the links for you if you want those links to the first three
54:08
workshops okay send me an email to info autore repo.com
54:14
info autor repo.com please take a moment and give me a rating from a scale of one to 10 uh
54:21
I I’ve just added this to my workshops one being this was a terrible waste of your time
54:27
and 10 being that we overd delivered you got value and that you enjoyed it just so I can get a sense of am I too
54:33
technical am I not technical enough all right so what do we got eight out of 10 Taran awesome James nine out of 10
54:39
anybody else give me a rating here oh wow really okay eights eights awesome
54:46
awesome okay hey thanks a lot thank you so much for your time have an amazing afternoon uh you will get the replay uh
54:53
link to this workshop and if you schedule a discovery session with us a discovery call I can guarantee you
54:59
whether we do business or not you’ll walk away with information that you’ll find helpful that’s what we’re in business to do is to provide value
55:05
thanks have a great day and I hope to talk to you soon