Building an Impressive Website That Gets You More High-Quality Leads

I think it's just all about talking about you, the customer. And I think about the ideal customer.
Just write your content as a love letter to them. But really, a lot of these guys that are running these companies, they were good salespeople or they are good salespeople.
So to me, it's just about taking what you're doing in person as a pitch and just putting that on the website. So we encourage a lot of the companies that we're working with, they're doing the copy for their main service pages.
There's a difficulty if you're having an outside company write the copy on your main service pages. So I believe you should be writing that stuff or you should have, like I think of it as scaling your best closer.
So who's the best closer on your company? Have them pitch to the camera, put that on the website, but also have the copywriter maybe pull out and extract some of those things. Welcome to the Home Service Expert, where each week, Tommy chats with world-class entrepreneurs and experts in various fields like marketing,

sales, hiring, and leadership to find out what's really behind their success in business. Now, your host, the home service millionaire, Tommy Mello.
Welcome back to the home service expert. Today, we've got an awesome live broadcast with Tim Brown, who is an expert in web design and development, SEO, digital marketing, entrepreneurship, and advertising.
He's based out of Minnesota, which is Minneapolis and St. Paul.
He's the CEO and founder of Hook Agency. He's done that since 2012.
He also was a big part of the Minnesota Search Engine Marketing Association and another company called Snap Agency a few years ago. Tim Brown owns a boutique digital agency out of Minneapolis that specializes in combining visual design and SEO for small businesses and construction companies.
Tim is a content strategy evangelist who has built or has been featured on Forbes, Neil Patel, NBC, Fast Company, and he's also the author of 101 Ways to Hook Better Leads. Well, we've done this before.
I'm excited to do it live. Can you tell me a little bit about the business, what you've learned in learned in the past, where you're going, what the future is of SEO?

Yeah, I got into web design originally.

That was my first love.

I still love design.

I think design is an interesting and actually a big part of making leads happen on a website.

And it helps with SEO as well, if you have good visual design. But yeah, I got to the point where I'd made a lot of pretty websites that didn't have anyone on them.
Or I've made a lot of websites. And so at a certain point, I really wanted to be part of getting those websites a lot more traffic, a lot more leads.
And so I slowly transitioned my career into that. SEO, as you know, Tommy, I know you actually have more SEO background than maybe some people know.
We've talked about PBNs. We've talked about different things that people did and some people still do.
There's a lot of different things. In particular, in the 2000 to 2010 time period, there was a lot of things you could do that like, it was actually insane.
You could get a ton of traffic from just like putting a bunch of white text on a white background, for instance. You could just spin up thousands of links back to your website.
It probably was a wonderful time in certain ways. And then it got harder.
And some SEO people that started in that time ended up just really pushing into ads, right? Because, hey, if I'm going to have to actually do crazy hard work to rank something on Google, I'm just going to pay for ads. Okay.
I got into SEO after all that. So ever since I've been in it, a lot of it has been around just creating really good content that people want to read, answering questions, and basically almost like PR level linking, like getting links from high-end, a little better websites than you used to be able to get away with links.
So when it comes down to linking these days, it's really about quality more than quantity. So if you wanted to pay for links like you used to be able to, it's very expensive, really.
And you still can. Google discourages it, but I don't live like Google is gospel.
So I like to find anything that works. I mean, ultimately, at the end of the day, it's really about being practical.
It's funny because Google says not to pay for links. Links is like the number one thing besides content that helps you rank these days.
Google says not to pay for links. And their whole business is built around, you guessed it, selling links at the top of their search engine.
So, hey, Google is not God when it comes to the ethics of this. I know you like to say Google is God when it comes to leads and home services.
I agree with that, but they don't necessarily say what my ethics are. So I like to leave with a little spiciness there for you.
Well, good, because, you know, I agree with you. You know, here's the problem.
You can pay the news. You can pay PR Newswire.
You can pay 100 different newswires. They don't mind that.
They don't mind if you pay. There's also easier ways to become a contributor to, like, Forbes and Huffington Post.
So as you put good content out, they lay like that stuff. They want it to be natural, but yet it's like most governments.
They want to be able to dictate the rules, but not follow them. And I agree with you.
And you know, what we've tried to do is really build strong, powerful edu.gov. And really what I found is PR is a great way to grow SEO.

It's a great way because it's the gift that keeps giving press releases.

And if you give the press release to come back to your website,

it really means a lot.

And then just amazing content.

A lot of people think SEO is dying just because now they got LSA ads.

They got the three top.

Then they got a couple of BBC.

Then they've got the sponsored GMB.

Then they got three more GMB.

in the world and he says there's no way i'll ever get to do organic because every year it changes i know my paid will always the algorithm doesn't change much for paid except for you know time on page good content quality score stuff like that so he says you study pay--click, you can move a lot faster and it's scalable. Organic doesn't seem to be as scalable.
What are your thoughts on all that? I agree to a certain extent. There is a reason that there's so many corporations just dumping money into SEO right now though.
They're hiring like crazy. There's a reason Angie Leads is doing a ridiculous amount.
I just lost an SEO to their agency. So the people that do Angie, but there's a lot of corporations dumping money into SEO.
Why? It's because 80% of the clicks are still going there. And honestly, okay, two things.
You might be right. Paid might completely take over.
The long horizon like if i look at a 30-year horizon somehow well 80 yeah let's just clarify that i understand what you're saying but 80 that's including the gmb right yes yep the maps as well the gmb the three pack is of course local search so i don't look at the, although it's organic. Do you believe there's a completely different algorithm that runs off of organic versus the Google My Business? I believe that there's definitely some things that coincide.
They used to match up perfectly four years ago, but I don't think so now. Yeah, it seems a little bit more randomized today.
It seems like a lot of the things that you do for your regular organic will be good for your GMB, but yeah, it's not quite as clean cut as they directly core. Because yeah, it feels like Google pops stuff in there randomly.
They'll take somebody that has two ratings, and they'll put it above somebody with 50 ratings. Honestly, the map stuff is sometimes a little bit of an enigma.
It's a little bit difficult to fully understand what's going on there. You know, they've got what's called the Google ladder.
And if me and you start 10 GMBs at the same time, they're going to fall different in the spectrum. But over time, they're really looking for the best of the best.
They're putting more and more data points in. Like Google Guarantee really monitors a lot more things.
Like how much are you booking the call? Did you get a review? How did it take you to get out there? And they're controlling that data. And the more data they collect, the better their algorithm is going to run.
And they're going to make you pay for it. They're going to make you pay to collect their data which is pretty yeah there's a lot to be said about the lsa as you know much about those yeah we really like lsa's i push them pretty hard it does depend a little bit on your market like if it's super saturated but we love lsa's i push that even if people don't work with us i'm just like get on lsa's but i might be over promoting it because i know that more and more people are on it yeah lsa yeah no it is yeah it's a micro site it's and it's a data collection i think there's a lot to be said today i talked to a buddy of mine who's one of the top copywriters on earth he does a lot of the fulfillment for frank kern and perry bel I mean, this guy won't go into who he is at this point, but he does about 120 agencies, does all the content and the scripting, and he's one of the best there ever is.
And he knows high conversion rate. How important are the words on your site and the funnel? Yeah, I would say two things, even for just having content on your site, I think a lot of home services businesses don't have enough content on their website, especially aesthetic home services.
I think about remodelers and stuff like that. We've worked on a lot of websites.
They want to have it sparse. They just want to show pretty pictures.
I think you need more content. So I say 500 to 700 words, at least the actual headlines.
And let's say the bullet points and the stuff right up top matters a lot. I think I'm challenging our designers because we design websites as well.
I'm always challenging them. Hey, because we ask really good questions in our discovery meetings with people.
We're getting their differentiating features. Why are you different than competitors? Making sure those things are right up top in bullet points in very easy to understand ways.
And also, these headlines have to be about the customer, not just about your company and why you're the best whatever company in Orlando. It doesn't matter to the customer as much or they want it to be about them.

Whenever we're kind of in this position

where making ourselves the hero of the story,

we're kind of putting ourselves at a disadvantage

because we're competing with the customer in their mind.

But I mean, I feel like it's funny,

Tommy, I know you're a very smart guy on this stuff.

So it's kind of funny.

I'd almost want to interview you a little bit on some of these things. I want to learn more about what you're learning out there too.
Well, you know, I think you got your competitive advantages are nothing to do with what the future holds. You can't say I'm the best at, we're open nights and weekends.
We do direct system background checks. It's all historical data that's the customer.
So out of the last 900 customers, 897 started on time.

And the other three were corrected within three business days, whatever that looks like. I learned this all from Janie Smith and the competitive advantage.
And really competitive advantages are based on what you've done. That's like saying, I'm the fastest runner, but I've never had a race.

How the hell are you going to make that statement?

So I think competitive advantages are built

on historical data.

I might be able to say something like,

we're the only company that goes through

a 60-day certification with a 8,000 square foot

training facility that flies their guys into Phoenix,

whatever.

And if I make it very specific, I can guarantee that.

But is it really cool that someone had 60 days

Thank you. foot training facility that flies your guys into Phoenix, whatever.
And if I make it very specific, I can guarantee that. But is it really cool that someone had 60 days training? Is that really a huge competitive advantage? So I think of competitive advantage, like a unique selling proposition.
And the KPI should be measured from the perspective of the client. And if you could work on those KPIs, what do I care about? I care about that my family's safe and in good hands.
I care you're gonna answer when we're when i get a warranty call i care that you're not going to be out of business in a few years i care about what i order gets cleaned up it's a static and then if there's a problem you're going to correct it fast but really here's how you do that you survey your customers yeah find out what's important to them because we always just do all my customers don't care about that and then you actually send a survey out you're like oh my god i see people that drive around some of the craziest freaking the cars that i would never even touch and there's a lot of them that sell and i'm like i can't assume that can i i can't assume no one would drive that but you know i'm curious there's so many mistakes out there just your hosting i went to a buddy's the other day in alabama his website didn't load on my phone it doesn't load on android mobile but it'll load on iphone um it's not indexed correctly it's just crazy by the way news of the day for the people watching live that godaddy just had a giant breach on their hosting where they just like dispersed everyone's WordPress information out there. So go check your WordPress and change your password if you're on GoDaddy right now.
I don't really actually have a skin in the game on hosting. I do like WP Engine.
I've used WP. I like WP Engine because it's fast.
It's's very fast hosting they have like really good cdn i don't want to go crazy technical for those that aren't interested in this but um then daily backup it's a really great host for a lot of businesses but i'm just texting to make sure we i got some stuff hosted on go daddy so yeah i'm change the passwords all. I'm just going to forward this to a couple of people because I've got multiple businesses.
So there's all these things that come on. Mobile get and happen, I don't know, like seven years ago or something.
And it just made sure it's fast load speed. If I had to tell you what my most important thing is in a website, the foundation is where it starts with is like the site map and understand how things get indexed and i think there's so many times that people don't really think about their anchor text and their metadata and they don't think about any of these things that are so important in a website so the foundation is where it all starts from and deciding a lot of them don't even think what shows up like you'll have all this nonsense show up under you know a1 grounds or repair or whatever it says so you can change all that stuff i don't know if people know that they could change what shows up yeah when you search them you know you can put in best prices guaranteed or fastest company out there in parentheses and it'll pop up yeah for meta titles and descriptions so if we get basically for the people listening or watching, the meta title is just that blue text that shows up on Google.
It's when you Google, let's say your name or your city plus the service you want to rank for. So one thing I like is for those of you that are doing some of this yourselves, it's about front loading the keyword towards the beginning of that meta title.
So having it at the very beginning, that still works. I do think having a unique value proposition, unique selling proposition in the meta title is a great thing to have there.
Sometimes you're trying to fit multiple keywords in there. And so that always comes first in this situation.
But I do see people sometimes literally just leave it as like homepage in their company name. And it's like, there's money there.
There's real money. If you actually spend the time on this, a couple ways to kind of do that quickly, if you're just getting into SEO, the tool arefs.com, semrush, SEMrush.com.
They just went public on the stock exchange. So SEO is getting its day in the broader market.
There is opportunity to look at what your competitors are ranking for. You can pop their website in there and see everything that they're ranking for.
Hey, it's actually quite amazing. Hey, and if you have an seo company pop theirs in there so you can see how much they got their uh what are this cobbler it's a cobbler that doesn't get their son's new shoes because i'm always scared of that hey i'm scared if you're if your seo agency isn't eating the eating the pudding of themselveso themselves i'll tell you this most seo companies i beg the dip for at least 75 are not the end seo company they're just the face of it it's like those companies in china yeah they go to a different manufacturer they're like they're taking their middleman fee almost all seo is done by a middleman and almost all content of an SEO company is done done by a middleman and then it's site yeah well like if you got your own writers with great content with you know there's little things that you want to pull out of there and bold and put great content that answers questions and put videos video marketing is huge on websites time on page All these things matter.
And I've just, I got to tell you, there's a lot of quick wins.

Think about. Marketing is huge on websites.
Time on page. All these things matter.
And I've just, I got to tell you, there's a lot of quick wins.

Think about this.

I know companies that literally they find stickers of old companies and they call the number of it doesn't work.

They buy that phone number.

Why not?

I like that.

Well, why not build a webpage for the old company and say, we know how to work on them and you rake for the companies that went out a business okay so there's a manufacturer called wayne dalton they got a torque master system my website is very very powerful you call wayne dalton guess what happens you're out four weeks who you're gonna call the next one down why not say your company works on torque masters the same day you put on that metadata same day these are things that i don't even do all the time i just i should just spend one day just fixing my own shit i was talking about you know the seo companies that don't eat their own whatever yeah drink their own kool-aid or whatever i I love it. Let and breathe it.
Just like you, Tommy, you've got the training system internally for your guys. You're making a training organization and that's important to you.
You got your manuals, you're helping people grow. And that's the biggest piece of your company, I think, from what I can tell from the outside.
To me, that's what we're trying to do. And I think ultimately, I'm not trying to like just a pure promotion, but that idea of creating a training company applies here as well with what we're trying to do.
And we have writers internally and SEOs internally. It stinks a little bit because, hey, people can come and swipe your guys and you did all this extra work to train them up.
But creating a training organization, to me, that's what it's all about. And I take inspiration from you and what you're doing over there, trying to create a training organization.
We talked about employees last time we talked. And I think that that's part of what I'm trying to do because I think it really is hard to go...
If you're just that company that lives off of everyone else's employees and goes and grabs them, and you don't have your own training system, I think it's going to be harder and harder over this next... It's kind of a bull market for employees right now.
Number one, first of all, the people are the lifeblood of the company, but I believe the system in which you get the employees and make the employees are all of it and you know here's one thing i do know for a fact keep your employees happy and it's impossible to keep every single person happy but if your employees are overall a good set of it with the company then they don't leave a competitor willing to pay more because it's such short-lived there's new guys coming into business that are i, I'll pay you more than anybody. Then they understand that, oh my God, I got to get a warehouse guy.
Oh my God, I need to buy new computers. No one ever told me about this insurance.
I got to have cyber insurance. What the hell? That costs me way more money.
So as they start adding these expenses, they're like, well, dude, I didn't know I had to pay for advertising. I can't pay you that much.
I'm a real business today. So you're going to have to take a demotion.
Well, shoot, I'd rather go back to that other company. If you're going to give me a demotion, I was happier there.
But if you create that loyalty... See, I believe in systems...
You know who Marcus Limon is? I don't, sir. So have you ever heard of The Profit? Yes.
Yeah, I know that. Show The Prof prophet by marcus limone he says yeah people process product look i might die who knows tomorrow's not guaranteed the process in which you get the people is key the process in which you get the product is key look at you look at mcdonald's they got lawsuit after lawsuit about their food quality because their process is broken, wish they get the food you know i won't even go into some of the stuff i've read about mcdonald's but if you look at the lawsuits that have been won the way that their food it's washed down with like ammonia before they yeah it's crazy the lawsuits but that's a process issue you know a couple guys have asked a lot of great questions here's here's a great one what are the top 10 questions that we should be asking our seo guy now and i don't know if you need to do 10 because that's like the top 10 might be a little too many because the top thing that i'd be asking and i'd be looking for is a call tracking number to know how much revenue am i getting revenue is the case they can't control your profit but i want to know my cpa how much does it cost me so i take all the calls that came in through seo and divide it by how much i'm paying for seo and then i it's going to be the lowest you do it should be for sure but if you don't have a call tracking number revenue is the first thing well no no i guess it would be leads yeah i was just gonna say lead quantity because ultimately they don't have control over your salespeople's ability to well here's the problem i have though i'll just tim real quick one day i had a ppc company that was getting me leads for five bucks a piece then i found out they were they were buying all the remote genie Morantek remote.
And all these people were calling me saying, hey, I need to buy a remote. So there is a- Those have to go back and forth.
Yeah. I'd go back and forth between the revenue, the leads.
I think I'm a soft marketer, right? So I also want to track how many people are on the website. I want to know how many of those are organic visitors i guess those four revenue leads i like to break down leads into qualified leads and unqualified leads because yes if your percentage is going up or down on that that's something to watch there's total traffic organic traffic i honestly think those four are enough well the other thing I look at is I got a lot of people in the past that do SEO that take advantage of, hey, I got you more leads than I've ever gotten.
And I say, well, we did billboards that month and we did TV. We did radio.
Looking at your organic growth as you do other things. So I look for organic to grow like this.
It's not going to grow like this.

Usually it'll grow like this.

And then there should be spikes when you do other stuff.

You got to look at that Google council and see the spikes as you're doing

other marketing,

because what's going to happen if you do a new money mailer or a valve pack

or a clipper,

or if you do a billboard,

I don't recommend doing all of them at once,

but eventually as you add in four or five and you start with your yardside campaign, you should start seeing Google slowly hockey sticking up. Yeah.
And I'll just give a couple more kind of leading indicators for this person that wanted 10. One is going to be links, but like the quality links that you're getting back.
I know that if you're not super technical, it's going to be a little bit hard to totally understand that. But I mean, if you are technical, to me, the quantity of links that you're getting above a URL rating of 12 plus would be a good thing to track links you're getting.
So if they're getting good links, they're going to be above the URL rating of 12 on a refs. There's not anything to say there that isn't quite technical, but then to me, it's content that's going out.
How much content, quality content are you putting out? Those are two leading indicators. We won't go any softer than that, but I got, I got other things that I look at and think about.
And these are the things that are required to get a result,

but the result is the main thing. It's just kind of, these things will help you pace.
And they are important basically. Well, there's quality of backlinks.
There's good content. There's also, I look at a heat map and I look at how much you're spending time and how often that person is changing the content strategy of where it relates.
Also, what are they doing with things like pictures? Are they geotagging it? Are they doing descriptions and the metadata of that? Like there's so many more things you could be doing and it's a never ending process. Sorry, I want to throw something in there.
Are you talking about, you were talking about tagging pictures. I just want to talk about one principle here.
SEO is really, to me, there's nothing that complicated about SEO from my point of view, I guess. But this is the hard part that's hard to track because it's all the little things that you might not necessarily know, like alt tags, like you're talking about for the photos and stuff like that.
It's really, and even I name files with the keyword in it, and I instruct all of our team to do it, which actually all gets read by Google. What I'm saying is it's really all of the basic things done consistently and relentlessly.
That's what SEO is. It's not necessarily these crazy...
A lot of these guru guys will try to sell you on some crazy new algorithm thing that they've concocted. The algorithm is always changing and it's around basic things.
It's kind of crazy to me that it's important to do the basic things consistently and well in SEO. And that's the weird part about it.
I know everyone likes to sell this crazy proprietary stuff, but it's really basic things done consistently, content content links there was this proprietary company that basically drove leads and that's the one time that they because it's an algorithm and they didn't have any machine learning in it it didn't understand the wrong things were reporting back and we got all these calls we got in the data i said whoa they said we got your cost call way down. And then it turned out that there were zero conversion calls.
It was a big waste of time. So understanding leads that convert.
And then there's always that question, what are, Bill Burst TV Radio, what happens is your branded search terms versus non-branded. SEO is about non-branded.
Of course, you better freaking come up for your own search terms. You better on your own keywords but if everybody's searching a1 garage door service the reason i do that is because well that's my company yeah if everyone's searching a1 garage door service the seo company shouldn't take yeah they should not you've done something you've done the rap trucks you've done the tv the radio but if you're popping up a garage repair sctsdale more often, so you got to understand

branded versus non-branded.

What are your thoughts on that?

Yeah, I think that that's very important.

It's hard to delineate in your situation.

It's a little easier for earlier companies.

So let's say the first five years, we have a high-end home builder here in Minneapolis,

right?

Their leads have gone up in such a significant way, but it's corresponded with their brand growth as well. So it's hard to get full clarity on that in a lot of ways.
We can track organic and we can track how many other great keywords they're ranking for. So those are the things that we focus on.
It's hard to fully parse that brand. What we want to do is we want to crank up leads.
And in some of our cases, we're the main thing that they're doing for advertising. So in those cases, it's a little easier.
Like I said, it's hard to get full attribution. And at that point, I think it's almost better to focus a little bit more on what are the keywords we're ranking for that are likely to be lucrative?

And how are they moving?

Are we moving up for those keywords, tracking them on a regular basis, looking at the historical trend?

Then you focus on that instead of just leads.

You just have to add in the top 10, 20 keywords that you're trying to rank for and really kind of make sure that those are moving up. If they move up, it's very good for your business.
But like I said, it is a little bit hard to fully delineate the brand thing. But you know, there's a lot of spots that you could be, you're not going to come up twice in the map section because not for a service company,

you wouldn't want that because you get pulled out of there. That happened once for me, unless you're like showrooms.
So you want to come up in the LSA, the GMB, the PPC, and the more names you pop up that look like the same name, the likelihood if you're there four times the three algorithms in the fourth one is just astronomically high you're almost for certain because we trust google that's why google makes so much money we trust the search results we know paid remember when they made the paid ads very they used to be like dark yellow and like nothing to do with really what i searched and i'd rather go to wikipedia than a google link it was like a national company doing paid ads and i'm like i don't want to call this company it was dark yellow then one day i woke up and searched something and all of a sudden it was really light it was almost the same color as organic and it barely in the bottom right corner said ad i mean i had to look for it and then i I was like, these crooks, they want to...

And they really tried to get a fast one, but Congress overturned.

They had to make it darker again, but not super dark.

Now, there's very good quality in pay-per-click.

Really, because they track your on-site.

They track how many pages you went to.

They track so many things.

You know, I thought I was a genius one day and i put the phone number in the pay-per-click ad at the top and then i realized my click-through rate went way down my call that call tracking number would weigh up because it was different on the ad than i had on the website so the call track i was like man i found a way beat Google. Then my quality score went down because I didn't get the click-throughs.
So then I was paying way more for a click when they did click. So Google beats you either way.
They're smart. Yeah, they're pretty smart.
And they're getting smarter. The old tactics just don't work anymore, man.
You said that you've been doing seo for a long time what are some things that used to work that don't work now i'm curious i can give a couple too well i can tell you just the fact that i used to best spinners but you do spun content basically spun content just means you could take a sentence free write it 10 times to come up with all the synonyms for every word and 10 synonyms per word. And best spinner just helps you find that data.
But when you read the sentences, you're like, I went to it instead of Ivy league, it might say a gratuitous and it will just, it's just the synonyms. All of a sudden you're like, oh man, it sounds like somebody, they're a fun content because i came from programming like in coding stuff i had pages on my website for different suburbs or whatever when i was starting out and i i would put the like city name i would just have everything written out and then i would like swap out the city name and like five different spots you know like and i thought that was going to work and it did for a little while.
And then basically Google's duplicate content gets smashed. So duplicate content used to work okay on city service pages and then it got smashed down.
There's another thing we used to do, the keyword density. It would be almost always always you could tell if it was nine percent ten percent twelve percent and you could basically do a study on 10 of the websites that ranked see success leads clues so when you could run the right tools to see how many times the keyword was so search garage door repair or spring torsion spring replacement and then you look at the website that ranked number one one and you can tell how many characteristics were in the metadata if you made it the exact same characteristics and have the keywords in the same spot and then you find out the keyword density and just got more links than them you'd always win studying that stuff really does it does it's a soft science but then there's youtube now and there's also this you know there's citation sites yeah here's the thing if someone wanted to learn an algorithm unless it was completely spontaneous which means there's no likelihood of having the same result for the best but i think if i had to build an algorithm today i would build it on a lot more metrics i want to control the phone call i want to listening to that phone call.
I want to look at the tonality. I want to see how many rings it get answered.
I want to know if it got booked. How would I know? Because of AI.
And over a while, over the next three years, as AI, right now, Facebook's listening to me. As this AI starts kicking in, they're going to say, this company's got more trucks.
This company comes out faster. This company has more reviews.
And it's going to get harder and harder to build this fake link pyramid scheme, whatever you want to do. The web 2.0, of course, web 2.0.
And everything that we're doing on link building, because link building, it's the less easy to understand aspect of SEO, but it's number two to content. And what I will say is everything that we're doing, it tends to be for better companies because they're the ones that can afford us, just to be honest.
And it's more and more resembling PR or digital PR. We do things like we pitch helper reporter out.
There's an awesome... Yeah, Haro.
Yeah, Haro is really cool. It's just reporters asking for leads, basically.
And they'll take your quote. Let's say you pit five, 10 things a day.
One of those is going to land. Five of those might land a week or three of those might land a week.
Each of those links back to your website puts you head and shoulders above most of your competition. It's weird.
It's not that crazy hard. It's just even for people that are trying to do this themselves, it's really just about doing the things that are a little more difficult.
And like I said, it just starts to resemble kind of digital PR a little bit more than it does like old school SEO and the black magic kind of wizard behind the curtain stuff. Even though like that stuff is cool.
It's consistency. You know, now when you get big enough and you actually get involved in the local community, you see, here's some easy ways to win.
And I've mentioned this before in the podcast, but go through your QuickBooks and find every single freaking person you're paying. Okay, Tim, I want you to do this.
I want you to go through your QuickBooks and write down every single person, whether that's a tool manufacturer, I want you to pull everybody. Then I want you to go on here and spend one minute each.
Hey, my name's Tommy. I use your bank.
And I just wanted to tell you guys, I think you're one of the best banks. I got to tell you guys, you're absolutely phenomenal.
I want to recommend you guys. Can I make a small video that just says how much you kick butt? And here's all I need you to do.
Just say Tommy Mello, the founder of A1 Garage with a link to a1grads.com with the HTTP. I want you to put my link in there and I'm going to do, and then I'm just going to write a quote down for you.
The Western bank, whatever the bank is named. And then I'll make you look good.
I'll make you look amazing because I just cherish our relationship. So I'd love for you to put it up.
If you're okay, putting it up on your site with a link back to me. But I say this, I'd like to get the credit back to a1grads.
It's where you're outstanding customer. So you find a a hundred of your relationships some of them are going to be monster now for me they'd love that because we've got a big influence so they put that up on one of their main pages now you've got a really good link and what i might even ask them to do is i might write a1 garage door the king of garage door, and then put my garage door repair that A1 garage.

So it's putting a certain bot in the, but that's one quick and easy way.

Another great thing to do.

I'm all about it.

And even if you didn't do a video, I'm just going to throw this out there.

We've gotten on like homepage, right,

right on the main thing just by just a couple of things that we really like.

Yeah.

Just in some cases and ask,

do ask that they add it to their website. Of course.

And then you become an influencer. And then here,

here's another thing you could do.

One of the things that I'd recommend is anytime I volunteer,

I do a lot of charity. Hey, we, we sponsor a hole.
I say, listen,

I will sponsor your hole. As long as I make a video and you put this, this is my signature with this, you know, a one garage or service.
And it's a link and you put it on your website on this page. I don't make them do it on the main page, but no one asks for that.
No one asks for the signature and the content to be put in. Everyone says, sure, we'll sponsor you a whole.
I'm like, listen, how much is the whole?

If I get you a good video that we do the edits

for and you guys confirm it,

do I have your permission

to get it posted on your site? And I'm going to make you guys

look like gods. I'm going to drag people

here. You're probably going to pick up 20 more sponsors next

year. Well, shit.
Yeah, of course.

Of course, we'd love to do that. You're going to

do the video. You're going to do all the editing.

Yeah, it's not going to be perfect. I'm going to make it look with a cell phone looks good.
And we're going to edit it up. We're going to make it look real, not like under stage lights and stuff.
But every time there's an opportunity, people just don't think about it. You don't think about this.
You're walking through a building. OK, you're doing a shop tour.
I don't care what you're doing. You take a quick video, say, dude, I'm at one of the coolest shops in the world.
I have Tommy Mel's in the other room, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I will put that on our freaking site or a certain page to show shop tours or whatever.
Do you know how much that link is probably worth from my set? I just showed you a 62 right now on Ahrefs. Like right now in the background, it's got 28,000 backlinks.
Linking websites, 2346. I know I've linked to you quite a bit.
Oh, yeah. Well, I think, you know, it's really cool.
Check this out. This is how you want Google to work.
Let me do one more share. And this is what's super cool for me.
I'll tell you what, if you haven't done this, if you haven't looked at AREFs on your website, you're missing out because it is actually very popular. I've told everybody look at this one this is for the podcast but i don't have that many links but look at how good i rate like it's pretty darn good and that's the key here is the quality of links coming back are coming from podcasts and other things so even podcasts could be a great form and just to put it in there and you know build content on like that just happened through google i have not done any seo on that yeah all of a sudden it started ranking very very well and all of a sudden more people start clicking on it and then that tells google this is good content and then they look at site on page i'll tell you what i've seen some of the best ranked

sites in the world have the crappiest conversion rate so what do we do about that what do we do when the website and a lot of people that have the most beautiful website doesn't rank at all no one's ever looking at it what do you suggest we do if you're a home service business i suggest you talk to hookagency.com.

Hookagency.com.

We do beautiful websites that also rank on Google. And I think, you know, some of the things that you can do, you know, if you're thinking about this, maybe making some modifications to your current website, I always say 500 to 700 words on each service page.
You can use things like show hides to hide some of that content if you don't want to have just a giant wall of text. It's really about considering the visual design and the SEO in tandem.
So you can make a beautiful website that ranks on Google, but you have to be willing to create a lot of content. And you have to be willing to do some of these things that Tommy's talking about.
And I'm talking about with Haro, podcasts, giving testimonials to people. There's a lot of things you can do for links, but you have to find something.
And once again, some people get on the news and they don't ask the news channel. They don't even give the news the freaking crap.
And they might not even ask you, but you can give it to them and they will cite you. They have to.
Here's something else. I know a company and this is what they do for a living.
They go to high paid drinks websites and they call up the admin and they say, listen, what's your favorite charity? They'll say foundation of animals. I don't know.
And you'll say, listen, I want to want to send you a 400 check i want to do a write-up on how many dogs are killed in a garage door because it's inhumane they leave them out there in the summers in arizona we'll do all the research we'll have the evidence how does animals have to do anything with garage doors but if you come up with a subject and you say because of the time you're going to take to put this on your website with your master web host and whatever, we're going to go ahead and give you $400 for your charity. We'll just send you a $400 check.
You do what you need with it. Do you know how many people, I don't have the time to do that, but do you know how many times, you know, I just told my trainer, I said, write me an article about home gyms.
And he goes, dude, your website makes a good, what would i have to do to get a link i said i want you to have 10 videos i want you to have 10 pictures and i want to rank number one for home gyms because i'll have the grad store installation matters but you do all the content for me and you make it badass and make the content i want 1500 words minimum and he said sure done so i got him to write the article and i'll link back to his website but who cares and then i'll just put my blurb about insulated rosers make more sense for a home gym here's how to get a free quote so i could also use people to write my content by giving them some links because some people protect their outbound links and say it's bad to outbound link but if not if it's a good website you're outbound linking to with a lot of great content. Yeah.
And yeah, that's exactly how I got into SEO because I was trying to rank for Minneapolis web design back in the day when we weren't a niche agency because now we only serve contractors. But I would just go out to websites.
I got articles on different websites. So you can do that too.
And it is a powerful way to guest posting as what they

call it guest posting and it's not that hard you can pay for play on that too yeah yeah yeah there's

a lot of ways to buy those as well i mean think about it you get a hold of humane society and say listen i want to write an article about some of the stuff that happens with the animal cruelty with whatever if it applied there's so many ways to kind of you could whiteboard this this crap

you about some of the stuff that happens with animal cruelty with whatever, if it applied. There's so many ways to kind of, you can whiteboard this crap and go crazy.
Talk to me about the winning website formula. Yeah, we have five things that we suggest every contractor home service business has on their website.
I'm going to go do them kind of quick and we can dive into them if you want. But one is strong visual call to actions throughout the website.
Two is testimonials and

other trust factors. Badges could be your manufacturers, it could be warranties, etc.

Three, emotionally persuasive images and headlines. Like I talked about earlier,

making your ideal customer the hero and help them imagine themselves working with you. What is that peak moment of emotional satisfaction that they have in the process of buying what you're doing and showing a picture of that, showing them in that state for an emphasis on search engine optimization throughout the process.
I don't think you can just slap SEO on at the end of a web design project. I think you have to build it with that in mind.
Build it with the right spots for content on your main services pages and make it look nice. But also the right buckets for content.
Should there be different buckets of content on your website? So a blog is an obvious one. Should there be a spot for videos? Should there be a spot for products that you're trying to sell?

FAQs.

Yeah.

FAQs is huge.

And then five really clear differentiating features or unique value proposition.

I have to ask that question five times in every one of our kickoffs with the client.

So I say, what can your competitor not say?

What can your competitor not say? And they go, what? They give me the basic ones. Customer service, higher quality.
And I have to keep digging. It sounds like that's something that your customer would say.
What can they not say though? And sometimes it's something weird. Sometimes they can't say that we're a five-person company and we have super intimate customer service and we'll answer the phone at 7 p.m.
or whatever it happens to be. It might be something weird, but you should use that on your website.
Whatever it is, something very granular and specific to you, you should be talking about those things as much as you can. And I think a lot of people get scared to do that when they're small because they're like, well, we're going to get big.
Well, you're not big yet. So use the smallness, you know, or if you are big, use the bigness, use the things that are very specific to you and kind of zero in on them.
And definitely say that like the best thing I can do on the copy side is like, go to the testimonials that somebody gave to you or the reviews that you didn't ask for and pull little snippets out of those reviews and use that as the headline or the copy. Because a lot of times you wouldn't say that, but your customer said that sometimes it's more basic than you would say it because they don't know as much about your thing as you do.
But pulling actual verbiage from reviews is a lovely way to kind of get inside of their head a little bit. I think there's so many things you could do.
When people talk to me, they say, what's the number one thing you need to do with starting a home service business? I say, figure out your brand and get your website going. Because there's one thing that Google, you can't make Google do.
Have you ever heard of Matthew Woodward? Oh yeah. Love him.

So he and I were talking the other day and I said, how much would it take you to rank a website to be number one in North America for a whole subject coming from zero? He said, full-time work, meaning content writers link building full-time to take over the whole country, minimum of 12 months. He goes, but that would be astronomically

we'd have to study the competition and that's starting from zero so what he'll do is he might buy three websites and do a three-to-one redirect on all of them to one he'll build all those three up yeah what do you think about that strategy i didn't think i was i mean here's the deal we

don't do that for clients but i've tried it like for instance i had a venture doing like a cannabis investing website and we did that because this person was like budget is not a an issue like we just need to crank this thing and what we did is we hooked it up like i think about it like hooking up a bunch of old car batteries to the back end. So you take five websites that are kind of in adjacent subjects.
You build up those pages on the website. You can crank up the authority.
It's just a little bit dangerous. Just like it's car batteries.
And also, you wouldn't want to accidentally burn that site. Well at all it didn't work see i look at it

like for example i have a competitor that got booted from his franchise and his website was amazingly ranked he worked on it every month he had seo done he had great content but he wasn't allowed to keep that franchise name so all he did is 301 that's the new website and he took a lot of that juice with him.

Yes.

But he didn't take a much

in that sight.

I love that.

I love that.

And honestly,

it's not even that big of a deal if you change your name i generally suggest trying to stick with the same.com for as long as possible but if you have like my company used to be called timbdesign.com and then we redirected hookagency.com three to four months later i would say 90 of the juice remained is just a rebrand so it's not that crazy you just need to make sure that all the redirects all the pages have the location they all load on the same exact urls because a lot of times you lose the content and all that so yeah what i'm saying is if i was going to build a franchise of 500 locations and i wanted to do it in a year i might find the best locally seoed that's something like 40 on ahrefs and then i'd redirect that to my new franchise site and then start working like crazy on that on a national level and amplify that. I'm just saying that's the best,

easiest way with a 301 to kind of

side swipe some

of the juice. I just, look,

I don't know if anybody

loves this stuff, but SEO is

Google is so important and SEO

and time on page and

click-throughs and interlinking

and having people sharing the content.

All these things matter.

There's such thing as sounding more salesy.

How can you avoid doing that on a website?

I think it's just all about talking about you, the customer.

And I think about the ideal customer.

Just write your content as a love letter to them.

But really, a lot of these guys that are running these companies, they were good salespeople or they are good salespeople. So to me, it's just about taking what you're doing in person as a pitch and just putting that on the website.
So we encourage a lot of the companies that we're working with, they're doing the copy for their main service pages. There's a difficulty if you're having an outside company write the copy on your main service pages.
So I believe you should be writing that stuff or you should have... I think of it as scaling your best closer.
So who's the best closer on your company? Have them pitch to the camera, put that on the website, but also like have the copywriter maybe pull out and extract some of those things. So I just think about your website is scaling the best closer and the best closer is not just sitting there talking about the features of your product or service.
Your best closer is talking about how it's going to change their lives for the better, how it's going to make their home better, how it's going to make their lives better. And that's all you got to do.
You got to talk about lives for the better how it's going to make their home better how it's going to make their lives better and that's all you got to do you got to talk about you the homeowner it's called blue ocean right yeah blue ocean means this when i sell a blender i can tell you how cool the blender is man this thing washes in minutes it's such a cool blender because it grinds everything and you're just the the blender has four different rotation speeds. It's got a lifetime warranty.
Who gives a shit? You know why the blender sales? Let me tell you how to sell a blender. Tim, what if I told you this blender chops up nutrients in a way that's going to make you live a healthier life, keep your memory longer, spend better times with your family because your skin's going to be softer.
You're going to be able to communicate more clearly. You're going to be more focused.
That's blue ocean. Really, what do I want when I want a blender? I don't give two shits about the variable speeds.
I want a blender because I want to be able to chop things up. I want to be able to make better food and more tasty and live longer.
I'm making protein smoothies in my blender. So blue ocean is going to that next step.
What is the reason you're doing this? Yeah. What would it take you to go for me, Tommy? Well, what is the reason that you ask for me is why would you want a garage door? What if I told you I trademarked, and everybody knows this, it listens to me, but the garage drawer is the smile of your home.
It's the only thing on your home that gives you 100% return on investment. More than your kitchen, more than your bathroom.
So what if I told you that 40% of your curb appeal is your garage door? When most people buy it, they realize they didn't spend any money. They made a great investment into their home.
And number two, I would tell you this, it helps sell the home. It's got a transferable warranty for May 1.
So even if you do decide, it's one of the sale features of the home. I mean, I've got a rebuttal for everything you can think about garage doors because it's spent so much time learning about what people ask.
But there's a Marcus Sheridan book called They Ask You Answer. Ask more questions, survey more people, find out what people want to know, and then build your content around what people are really asking.
Because us as professionals, to think we know of all everything people ask but when was the last time you really listed the stupidest stuff comes out of their mouth well how loud is this thing gonna be well how loud is a garage door opener how do i know what's a quiet one why not do a survey on all 10 of them and say this is the pros and cons to each opener and say look say, look, but here's the thing. Here's a little secret sauce that I can tell everybody listening.
Look at the questions that Google answers. And if your website ranks right, try to answer some of those questions too.
You'll outrank those companies if you have the good SEO done. Oh man, you know what we should do, Tim? We should do another one of these and we should just really spend time going through four different websites let me show you some stuff here i just i just got random person you tell me i'm in i'm gonna be in your uh neck of the woods in february yeah let's do it in person i've heard you say that you're open to somebody doing a company tour.
Would you testimonial? So yeah, I'll do a really adamant testimonial and I'd love to do this dissecting websites in person. If you're open to it.
So I wanted to show you one thing. So this is my website.
It's not the great though. I love it, but I think there's some more things.
This is what roofing said. I said i just pulled up a random one yeah that's got this beautiful video played in the background this is one that's just got a picture of this lady in the background with a guy looks like doing something to her sink and it's a plumbing and air conditioning company yeah and i think this is to each their own depending on how it loads and website and stuff but let me ask you this do you like the video in the background kind of going and showing different things do you like a static website that just has a good picture what's the deal so i like to make the interactivity be a little bit more in like the buttons and the the opening and closing and like a little bit of carousel stuff the video thing i just I just launched two websites with it, but I want to say, I do think it hurts your load times.
So the two companies that we did it were commercial construction. And I felt like the aesthetics of what they were doing was so important.
We did that for a granite showroom too. We've done it for a little bit more like high aesthetic home service businesses.
In general, I'm kind of nudging people away from it because of the load time. Like it really does affect your SEO.
If you have high load time, if you do have a video background, which I do think is, it does look really cool. I think that the, yeah.
So do you know what a lazy loader is? You know how how lazy loader works yeah yeah so you could always activate the lazy loader man i love that i know some of this stuff it's been a while but you could yeah i love talking about mobile for mobile you could activate the lazy loader yeah and what that does is it disengages certain things for load speed on mobile so you want to make sure that your score is super high. I just know this because Andrew was working on it with Madden.
But let me ask you this. I got to go through some of these questions because we're a little over.
If they want to find you, Tim, and they want just the access to get you and have you go through their site and maybe even just see how they're doing, what's the best way to reach out to you and go about doing that? Just check us out at hookagency.com. We have a lot of information there about our services, kind of going through an overview.
And then just connect with me personally on Tim Brown, Hook Agency on Facebook, LinkedIn. But yeah, hookagency.com to check us out.
And we're definitely down to just talk through where you're at currently. We can put it in our tools and see how you're doing and talk through how you might improve it.
All right. And give me three books that you love.
Traction. Three books that mean a lot to you.
Just nothing about home. I don't want to hear my books.
So don't do. So tell me three books that you love.
Hey, I'll throw out Traction. Boom.
This book, absolutely phenomenal. It didn't mean anything to me when I was an employee because I read it once when I was an employee.
And then when I went out on my own, I was like, this thing was a godsend. I'm going to say The E-Myth Revisited.

Once again, this is about creating systems in your business.

And it's absolutely phenomenal.

From the very beginning, I've been reading this.

So like everything, I wrote out all the job titles that I was going to have to play in my business in the description.

And then I was those titles and I handed them off one by one.

And lastly, and I know this is going to be...

Some people hate this guy, but I'm going to throw this one out there. I love the 10X rule by Grant Cardone.
No, no, no, no. I think he's genius.
I really do. I really subscribe to Grant now.
And I'm not a big fan of most of the people out there, but I really enjoy what he's doing. It's just about making bigger goals, making bigger goals.
Yeah, 10 times bigger because when it forces your brain to do is not think, how do I grow 10 times? You got to think differently. You got to say, holy crap.
When I started thinking 10 times, I said, man, I'm going to have to become a consolidator. I'm going to have to work on systems.
I don't need a training facility. I'm going to need a recruiter.
So the difference is it changes the way your brain actually functions when you think because 10 times I might be able to go 300% if I keep doing the same thing and just start working harder and hiring more people. But if I'm going to grow a thousand times, it needs to be a different mindset.
Yeah, exactly. I love this stuff, man.
And then tell me, I'm serious about trying to visit you. I'm not, I didn't mean to put you on the spot, but I would love to check out your facility.
No, no. Brio set it up, and I'd love to have you.
We'll do another one, and it'll deliver a ton of value. My goal is that everybody listening gets tons and tons of value.
Awesome. So last thing I ask is we talked about a lot of stuff here.
If you could give some stuff, maybe some take, go-to-action things, maybe something we didn't discuss, maybe just some great insight on something.

I'll give you a couple of minutes to kind of close us out.

Yeah, I think, you know, for a lot of people out there, it's just going to be Googling

the name of your company, seeing what comes up, potentially diving into either A-Refs

or SEMrush, A-H-R-E-F-S.com or S-.com or s e m rush.com seeing where you're at the first step is seeing where you're at and if it's bad don't get discouraged man we're all starting from somewhere and google is going to dominate for another 10 years i'm going to go out and make a bold prediction that google is going to be pretty important for another 10 years at least. And just popping yourself in those tools and popping a couple of competitors in those tools.
And then lastly, if your website isn't quite up to snuff, just Googling the winning website formula, going through like, so our website will come up, just go through one by one and make sure that your website has those things. It doesn't mean you have to fully redesign the website.
It just means get more testimonials on there, get more clearly differentiating features on there, get more pictures of happy customers on there, make sure you have clear call to actions. So it doesn't have to be a complete redesign.
It just means you need to make sure that you're getting trust on your website. Trust is the biggest thing.
I'm excited. You gave me some good ideas.
My brain goes 90 miles an hour. You know this.
It's just getting actionable items and getting the results you need. I got some good ideas.
You know what I'm going to do too is everybody's been asking me how to remove bad Google, my business pages that you know are fake. I was going to run through that.
I'm going to do a bonus here, not today, but I'm going to teach people how to do that. You just made me think of that too.
So listen, I'm excited. Happy customers.
Make it exciting. Show off your products.
Show your unique selling propositions by saying what you've done in the past and really start thinking about that because that's great information i gotta tell you tim you are very informational very fun very cool we're gonna do this again you come out in february we'll make it a a fun time and we'll make it a learning experience to me and you got to catch up on a lot of stuff so get with brie we'll make that happen and you most of the time that i'm there i could just kind of hide in the shadows and look around don't worry about me i don't want to take up a whole day of yours i just want to kind of like look around and i think what you're doing is very cool so tommy thank you for being open to at least talking to me for a little bit when i'm there i will have anybody you want that i've already had lots of companies i try to get five through here a's more than free to come in, check us out. There's no secrets here.
We'll show you the LMS. We'll show you the trainers and recruiters.
I use three different CRMs. I'll open the doors and I love this stuff.
So I'm glad to have you, brother. Cool.
Appreciate you, bro. Thank you.
All right, Tim. Take it easy, bro.
All right. See ya.
Hey guys, I just wanted to thank you real quick for listening to the podcast from the bottom of my heart means a lot to me. And I hope you're getting as much as I am out of this podcast.
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