Too many generalize the words “Marketing”, “Website Marketing”, “SEO”, “Facebook”, and “Google”. Your website is a nucleus with so many Free and Paid topics supporting the opportunities to generate more quality leads consistently over an extended period of time. In this webinar, we’ll cover Remodeling examples, as well as specialties such as Roofing and Windows.
Javeline is President & Co-founder of MyOnlineToolbox, the industry-leading Online Marketing & Website Education Series. MyOnlineToolbox also provides Marketing Planning Services for local market domination with a focus on More Quality Leads. Brian has been featured in Entrepreneur Magazine, has written for Fast Company, and is a frequent guest speaker focusing on Marketing To Grow a Business.
Awesome. Yeah. Everything looks fantastic here. Thanks again, everyone, for joining us. If you're just now joining, welcome.
On the right side of your screen, if you've been to one of our webinars before, you're probably familiar, but there's a chat feature over there. It's white on the right side of your screen. Just let us know where you're coming from. Additionally, during the webinar, if you have any questions, please feel free to reach out.
I'll keep track of those while Brian is in his presentation. As soon as he's ready to answer them, I'll go ahead and relay them back.
Good morning, Steve. Good morning, Rudy. Thanks for joining us.
Allen? And we'll give it about five more minutes here, and we'll go ahead and get started, promptly here at the top of the hour. I'm sorry, Brian. What was that?
I am I just forgot only one thing, which was my cup of water in the office cafeteria. Let me just walk out two rooms to grab it, and I will be right back.
Oh, yeah. No problem.
Thank you.
Of course. Of course.
Way too much while I'm I'm gone. Okay?
Yeah. I won't.
I'm back out, Alex.
Awesome. Hey. Good morning, Gary.
Thanks again, everyone, for joining us. If you're watching this recording, just fast forward about three minutes, and we're going to get started here promptly at the top of the hour. Per all of our webinars, we'll always have a recording available afterwards. Welcome, Thomas, over there in Boulder. Fantastic.
We'll have the webinar recording afterwards just a couple hours from now. And if you're curious where I'll be while the webinar is happening, I'll still be in the room just in the background taking some notes on what Brian is saying, generating somewhat of a blog post that we can then post on our website for anyone that missed it, as well as the webinar recording.
We'll have that on YouTube. Brian will also have it.
You know, so all this information will be available afterwards.
But, awesome here. I'm I'm glad to see such a good presence over here in the chat feature. It's always cool to see all of our contractors across the United States.
If if anyone else is joining, hasn't yet, let us know who they are and where they're coming for coming from rather, please let us know over there on the right side of your screen. Just a little white box. It's a chat feature. You can also use it to ask any questions during the webinar.
If Brian is kind of going with the flow with the presentation and we don't get to your question right off the bat, don't worry. I'll keep track of them and relay them back to Brian as soon as he's ready.
Great. Well, let's, go ahead and get started here so we can kind of get going at the top of the hour here, Brian. Thanks again for joining us, Brian. This has been a, you know, fantastic series.
We're very excited to add on an additional webinar. It was great to see that you've been working with, Markup and Profit. They had a fantastic webinar about a month and a half and ago with us. You know, I know that you've you've done presentations with them.
You actually did one last week with them, which is awesome. I think this is a very important topic, especially for our contractors that value their online presence. You know, everything from the SEO to the Google reviews, everything online, because, you know, as as much as referrals are happening in person, they're very much happening online as well. People are googling.
They're searching for contractors. So your online presence is very important and, you know, it's it's awesome to get someone in here that has an expertise on that. and if I understand, we're actually going to be looking at one of our Clear Estimates customers, website, which is fantastic. So we can kind of all relate to that in a sense and get an idea of, you know, how we can improve our website, some tips and tricks that Brian can offer, to improve our quality of the leads that are going to be coming through our website.
But, yeah, with that, Brian, I really do appreciate you joining us, and I'll kinda turn over the keys here. And, again, everyone that's just joining us, there's a chat feature on the right side. It's great to see everyone that's joining us across the United States. And if any questions come up, feel free to ask them over there in the chat feature, and I will relay them over to Brian, so he can answer them when he's ready.
Thank you, Alex, and thank you everybody for joining us. My name is Brian Javan of My Online Toolbox. For those of you who don't know me or My Online Toolbox, more people know My Online Toolbox, the brand.
We focus with one objective to working with contractors, service providers, remodelers, and new home builders with an objective to specifically growing people's businesses with more quality leads. And we like to ensure that when people are saying websites, SEO, Google, Facebook, or whatever the technical buzzwords or social media buzzwords are, we'd like to make sure that everyone realizes it's a subset of marketing. There is no silver bullet topic. We are here to talk to talk about connecting the dots in all aspects of marketing with an emphasis of the online world, and that is where we're going to go.
I'm going to leave this quick screen, and I'll probably just say it once, which is for people who are into the weekly free tips or quick reminders, please just like the Facebook page of My Online Toolbox. We don't inundate you. We just provide one quick reminder tip on a weekly basis, which seems to be a popular thing for people when they're busy in their day. But moving forward, we're now going to start the presentation.
And, again, the focus is growing your business with more quality leads with an emphasis of marketing, the topic of marketing, technical topics with websites, SEO, education, but most importantly, understanding how it all connects through a strategy. MindLine toolbox has won numerous awards for various aspects of digital marketing, content marketing, video marketing, website marketing. And the key thing I like to say when I say those words is they all mean something different. And that's what we're going to bring to you at a fast paced webinar right here.
And I also do thank, Alex and ClearEstimates that we do have some clients that we'll see that are actually joint clients, coincidentally. We both had different clients that we found out, but after the fact that they're joint, and that's how we got together in addition to being introduced by another marketing firm, excuse me, efficiency firm called Markup and Profit. So to begin with, everything I'm going to be talking about today is critical to where you're going, not next Friday or not next quarter, but really two quarters, three quarters out, but for the rest of your life. And the biggest challenge that we have as marketing folk, for lack of a better word, is people waiting to strategize for when is a great time to get started.
And we always like to tell people that if you think you have an idea where you want to go next quarter or at the end of twenty twenty, start implementing today because unfortunately, it does take time for the residual of what you do today to actually make an impact to bring in leads on a consistent basis many months, many quarters, and even many years out. So don't strategize for that perfect time, which happens to usually be in this industry. People tend to like to wait for somewhere between the last week of Thanksgiving and the second week before Christmas. That isn't going to cut it.
Make sure that marketing is part of your life on a consistent basis, and even if you take a sliver of your time on a consistent basis with a handful of topics, the residuals of generating future leads is enormous, and that's what we're going to start talking about now. So as I move forward, I like to make sure that people realize that this is a very diverse industry and a very diverse group who may be listening to either through the Clear Estimates channel or the My Online Toolbox channel. But whether you're a remodeler, you're doing window restorations, you're doing roofs, siding, decks and porches, or new home building, this entire industry is so weak when it comes to marketing that it actually takes a very limited, consistent effort in order to generate leads.
So keep in mind that there's no specialty here. It's an industry as a whole that we're looking to cover. So as I go forward now, I'd like to make sure you realize that without a plan, when we're guiding people, we like to have people think of their marketing life like coming to your competition like a stealth bomber. The great news is many of you listening are weak at certain areas, but the better news is the vast majority of your competitors are equally weak.
So it doesn't take much to actually catch up to people who may be ahead of you or even surpass them.
We want to make sure you realize that when you say a website, do not treat that as it means marketing. A website is a component of marketing, but it is not marketing in its by itself. And it's kinda like debating which one is better, Google Docs or Microsoft Word. But if you don't really know how to write a coherent sentence, who cares which word processor you're using? It's the same thing when it comes to websites.
When you have a website and you don't use it correctly, the results are going to be the traditional, I'm unhappy, nothing's happening, and It's because you feel, or you felt, or were misguided that the website itself, by just placing it online, automatically the magic's going to happen, and it's not. It does take a plan to have the website as being the nucleus of your marketing, but it doesn't mean having a website automatically means that magic comes comes out.
Connecting the dots is critical. Your website has to be used correctly, which we're going to show you as an example.
Google My Business has to be used correctly in order to connect the outside world of how Google looks at you to the inside world of your Facebook, and also other components such as Facebook and YouTube, different aspects of the way the world communicates today, and utilizing it correctly, again, utilizing it correctly, that it helps benefit traffic coming to your website.
The challenges are simple, but they're the same things repetitive. The first thing is there are too many developers who unfortunately do not understand the industry. They're very talented from a technical perspective, and they could probably even be more talented than me on individual technological topics, but the problem is many of them don't know the difference between something like basement remodeling and basement finishing. Many of them don't understand the differences of residential additions versus commercial build outs, and even though they may sound similar, we have spent too much time helping people realize that the reason why they're not getting good leads is they did a great job at marketing what they don't do.
And when we go to explain to people that, they say, well, I told the programmer this and that, and they don't realize that the programmer didn't hear them the way they were communicating. So that one challenge is something that we're trying to help eliminate, and the other is is that too many contractors simply do not know their competition. You may know them from seeing them in the field. You may know them because you heard of a customer complaining about somebody else or complimenting them, but what you don't usually know is how are they marketing their business, and many times the contractors themselves don't know.
They've written a check to somebody else, they're happy getting whatever leads they're getting, and then inadvertently, your company is making decisions based on a lack of information. And kinda like me being a soccer coach, for twelve years, I make a lot of decisions based on the strengths and weaknesses of who I'm going up against. I've beaten many teams who are better than me simply because we out coached them, not that we had better players. It's the same thing when it comes to marketing, and I'm going to use this fast paced webinar to hopefully, open up the light at the end of the tunnel so you could see many things that we see clearly.
Using this as an example, one particular customer, and this happens to be a joint customer between, MyOnlineToolbox and ClearEstimates, here is a customer, a remodeling contractor, who, at face value, he looks like he's just a residential remodeler and a commercial, remodeler. Here is another contractor who happens to just look like he's doing window restorations and window preservation.
Another contractor who's doing roofing, but when you look closely, it's obvious that he's not looking to promote shingle roofs, but he used to, in the past, get many individual leads for shingles, and he was spending too much time explaining to people what he didn't do and not focus in on telling the world what he specifically wants to do and eliminate the interruptions of what he doesn't want to do. So now what we're going to do, after we just broad stroked a few couple of types of customers, want to start off with making sure you realize something that every single one of you is more powerful than you realize, starting with content. And what I mean by that is that when I say you're more powerful than you realize, you're like a living, breathing newspaper.
Your entire life is a visual and physical representation of things before you showed up, things during your showed up, and when you're done and completed and hopefully have a happy customer. And this information that you have is so valuable, and we're going to get into why so many of you, one, use it incorrectly for your own marketing, and two, and even worse, give it away to other lead generation companies who know that you're weak at using it and, two, can't wait to give it to somebody else under the umbrella of the word free. So what I want you to do is realize every single one of you is almost like a living, breathing reporter who could either do one of two things. You could write stories for your own powerful magazine that goes out daily, weekly, or quarterly, or you could take all this information and give it to somebody else and pay for leads for the rest of your life based on the very content that you created.
The content that you have is very powerful in the branding of who you are, what you do, and where you do it. And I'm going to do it in the order of importance of who, what, and where. And done correctly, two things are going to happen. One, consumers or your future customers are going to become better informed about specifically what you do and where you do it and who you do it for, and simultaneously, you'll be teaching the search engines.
The buzzword, SEO, stands for search engine optimization, and, yes, there are many things that require a technical person to turn it up a notch. But there are many things that you could either do yourself, or by simply understanding the benefit of what it's doing, you'll sooner communicate to your programmer better to implement this content, more accurately. And I kinda like to tell people it's the analogy of we all have a cell phone, and what I would love you to do if you're taking any notes, the top note I would love you to take is when we're done with this webinar, call your business or your cell phone and make believe you're a prospect trying to do business with you.
And listen to the tone of your voice, listen to how you ask on this potential lead, you know, what they're interested in and say to yourself, would this person really want to do business for me with me? And the reason why I say this is it takes me months to quarters to help change your entire marketing campaign for life. But if you're not going to appreciate the lead when it eventually shows up and sees the opportunity, why bother doing any marketing anyway? Just forget it all and just stay the way it is and let things be status quo.
But if you answer your phone, hello. This is ABC Remodeling. We're in the field right now servicing other clients. Please leave a brief message to specifically how we could help you and, more importantly, where you're located.
We'll get right back to you. Thank you. Something along that lines where it's an upbeat message as opposed to, unfortunately, I call people back, and I get a tremendous amount of the voicemail is overloaded. Sorry, call back later.
I get, hey, this is Tony. You know what to do, beep. And all of those comical little things, may be comical, but they're not when it comes to trying to satisfy the thirst of getting more quality opportunities on a consistent basis.
Now let's go forward and give some examples. When I say content is king, who are we? Keep in mind, I have thousands of customers across the United States, and I've probably met, if lucky, a hundred in person, but I met them after they were customers.
In your case, you have to set up an image that allows people to feel comfortable with the person who's actually coming into their business, coming into their home, petting their dog, sitting at the kitchen table, barring the bathroom, whatever it may be. You're looking to actually, make people feel comfortable with you before they even make a phone call. So in this particular example, using that roofer, he actually was a client of mine for a long time. And then one day, he passively said to me, oh, you should check out my truck.
I didn't even realize it that the whole time he never showed it to me. But looking at that truck, it's a real roofing truck. It's a real business truck. It's not just a truck with a magnet, you know, those little white magnets that are placed, you know, pasted right onto it that he takes off when he goes home.
Little things like that show this guy's in business for what he wants to do. And all of a sudden when people call him and he shows up, it gives a much stronger impression as opposed to that, you know, one man in a truck mentality. You want to be able to do things like that. But if possible, what you want to also do is turn it up a notch, and I'm just using the same joint client where he went a little bit deeper into the introduction about how long he's in business and things he likes and stuff like that.
And he's a real great guy, and I'm glad to have him as a joint customer. But then comes, if you're more than one person, if there's a team in this industry, there's always a perception that, oh, I need to talk to the boss, and that's self imposed by you, especially if you have a team. I don't care if you have a team of two, five, or twenty. If you have anything besides you, if it's you, you definitely need to have a presentation online.
But if it's a team, you're missing the boat of presenting an established company, whether that company is two or five or twenty, doesn't matter. But make sure that people could see that this is a real company because they start to get an extra level of confidence that's beyond me just generating the lead. The people come to your site, they have no idea what they're going to see. Don't hold that ace up your sleeves and just hope that people based on reputation are going to have an impression on you.
I love to tell people don't judge a book by a cover, but we all know that's BS.
If we go to a party together and you're in slacks and a shirt and I come in a tuxedo, you could bet people are going to think I'm more established, more classy, whatever it may be. And I may not be. You might be more classier than me, but if I look better at that given moment, there is a first impression. So don't discount that it happens in the real world, even though in fantasy world, we would love to make believe that nobody judges a book by its cover.
The same thing goes, turning it up a notch, where people getting comfortable obviously like to read, they like to see pictures, but they also when they see a picture and when they read, they hear their own voice.
The only thing that could surpass that is hearing it directly from the horse's mouth, which is you. It's unbelievable how easy it is for you not to sell yourself, but to market the excitement of what you do, who you do it for, where your passions are. And when people are actually able to get comfortable before they make one phone call to talk to you, even though those particular we're going to get into it. Those videos are fifty fifty.
They're fifty percent there to help, enhance the image of the person, but they're also fifty percent there to help generate future leads for people who don't know about this, new home builder in Cedar City. So the videos could be done with a smartphone, or they could be done professionally. Either way, by having a handful of introductory videos, you're now loosening the comfort level of somebody before they pick up the phone to call you or for you to pick up the phone to respond to an email. You could actually use videos to say, you know, dear missus Jones, I got your inquiry.
Thank you so much. We're busy today. I will get back to you tomorrow. Please just glance at this short video to get an introduction for me, about me, and I'll get right to you.
So you did respond to them. You did it smartly because you're intentionally reducing the intimidation factor of them feeling they know you before they call you. So you're giving them this video, and you know that the video is exactly what you want to say. The first three to five minutes, whatever it may be, is coming out in a very clear, consistent pattern of what you want to say, and you are we are, including me, all different based on the pattern of our day.
There's been days we all have a great day when we're talking to somebody, and there's other days that all of us are hyperventilating to try to get something else done, but you're now talking to a new opportunity that you're dying to get to, but your attitude has been adjusted based on the dynamics of the day. If you get a video out to somebody before that first call, they've already gotten a sense of who you are in a very calm, relaxing manner, in a very uniform way. So even if you happen to be a little bit hyped up and don't realize it, or a little antagonistic or whatever words you want to use, at a minimum, they've already seen the best of who you are based on how you wanted to present yourself.
Then comes the holy grail of marketing period is getting videos of customers to talk about you. It is one and only, hands down, the only twenty four by seven best sales reps ever, including you. No one could outsell you other than customers. They will always be the person, the point of reason, the comfort level, the reasons why they talk to you, the problems you solve, the timeliness, the efficiency, the professionalism.
It doesn't really matter. Coming from someone else but you is literally the holy grail, and I will always tell you whether it's professional or on, on a cell phone, and I do both for myself too. Couldn't care less. Get three, five, fifty, a hundred. It's unbelievable how many different ways you could use it and how this literally will benefit you twenty four by seven when other people make consumers or future consumers happy with how they were dealing with you before you get into your sales pitch.
Moving on. When I say content is king, and this goes back to that original client that I mentioned with, SFCC, this joint client between, Clear Estimates and MyOnlineToolbox.
Most of you, when you look at your sites, when you look at your marketing, you tend to be more generic than how people look for you. And let me just use this one particular screen that popped up. I originally said he's a residential remodeler, which is true. However, most people, when they're looking for a residential remodeler, they may, and it's very little limited, but they may look for a residential remodeler. But more than likely, they're going to be looking for a kitchen remodeler, a a whole home, addition, roofing, or whatever the specific topic may be.
You want to take a step back and think of your business as when the ideal person is looking for me. What specifically do I want to talk about as if and it's a very simple as if. As if I only had one landing page to talk about just this one topic. And let me use a quick analogy and forgive me when I do this each time, but it's easy to visualize, using this particular remodeler In the past, when he had his old terrible website, he had a landing page for remodeling, and it basically talked about everything under the sun for remodeling.
The first thing was there was too much content there, so there's no reason for the search engines to say you are a kitchen remodeler, you are a roofer, you are, you know, home additions.
He needed to, one, create individual pages as if they were their own standalone one page websites, but separately, the mistake he made on that singular page was the original web page, and I just happen to remember this, it happened to have bathroom remodeling above kitchen remodeling. And the problem was, out of the entire page that had everything he did, the only thing being indexed was the first thing that was mentioned. So his entire initial marketing was under the umbrella of bathroom remodeling and all of the big ticket items were being missed simply based on the order of how he organized his content.
So that's one quick little example that you could if you're you're upset about your site or you're clearly not getting the type of leads that you think you want, go look at your site and say, if I am a kitchen remodeler, do I have a page that clearly, maybe it's not perfect, but does it clearly amplify one and only one topic, kitchen remodeling, as if that's the only selfish thing you do for a potential person looking for you. It's the analogy when people call me up, I'll joke with them or tease them, and I'll say, hey. Tell me about yourself. And that's a very dangerous question to a contractor because you guys could probably talk for ten to thirty minutes as fast as I am and brag about life itself, all the things you've done and so forth and so forth.
But the critical mistake you make is you're hearing the question as a salesperson because that's what you're most comfortable at, promoting what you do, how you do it, how much you're in love with what you do, and so forth. But what you're not thinking about is before you answer the question, it's a trick question. If I ask you, tell me about yourself, the first mental response you should have is, well, Brian, I have so much to say. So before I answer, tell me specifically what you're looking for so I could tailor my answer.
Now you're becoming a marketing person focusing in on leads and not a sales guy thinking that by you bragging to me about everything you do, you're going to get my attention. And especially if you're boring me and not talking about what I'm interested in, you're losing me anyway.
Use that thought process to kind of flip how you communicate with people, and that's where the merger of being a marketing person starts to collide with being a good salesperson, knowing that the majority of you are better at sales than marketing.
Going here, continuing on with Content is King, let's assume on any of your marketing, if I had a bet without knowing the volume of the people here, I would bet you the vast majority of you are okay or somewhat okay in explaining what you do. You may be so so in explaining who you are, and I'll bet you the vast majority are somewhat between nonexistent and terrible about telling the world where do you prefer to work. And if you don't do it correctly, the search engines may view you like a Chinese restaurant, and I'm not offending anyone, who's Chinese here. I'm just making a point that a lot of times if you just put in whatever, you know, Chinese restaurant or food, you're going to see a little circle of where the driving radius of the five miles.
You don't want the search engines to view your business as I'm based here at point a and draw a little three to five mile circle and say, this is where I like to be. First of all, half the towns may not be economically viable. And then the other three quarters, half that you're missing altogether are not even on the map. You need to go out of your way to be very specific on where do you prefer to work.
And if you're not doing it correctly, all the leads you're getting are just sheer luck that the search engines are figuring it out, or your competitors are equally or if not worse than you in explaining to people where do you prefer to be.
Going forward, A lot of times, eventually, you're going to get these leads. They will come in, and someone's going to land on your site. You have to remember that the image is critical. That first impression, in this case, it's a painter, you show up here and it's serious.
This is a nice beautiful house that he painted, but the time that it takes to generate leads far exceeds the time it takes to change a picture. So at any given time, he could change this particular picture. This one's where is it? It's on his home page.
He could change it within seconds. However, when we first got the site live, and I believe it was a year and a half ago or something, I believe it took almost six months to generate his first leads. So what I'd like you to keep in mind is that while the image is critical, never forget that generating the search or the marketing opportunities to come to your site takes so much more time that I'd much rather you have a decent picture that's indexed well, which we're going to get to in a moment, as opposed to waiting for that perfect picture, and you're not going to do anything until that perfect picture is there.
I'd much rather you have a good picture or an okay picture, index it well, and then one day, change it knowing that I could change it in six months, but we're still waiting for the lead that we've been preparing for since January two thousand nineteen. So keep in mind, it's two different elements. Don't wait for perfection in order to get your marketing going knowing that any images could be changed on the fly.
So going back, when I use that example, with marketing for leads is critical too, I'm literally really trying to go back to these titles of when I say indexing, what do I mean? Another takeaway when taking notes, the first thing I mentioned, about the voice mail, just when you're done, check your voice mail just to see. You might be surprised about what it says. The next thing is, as a takeaway, number two, would be for the rest of your life, when you look at your website and you look at anybody else's website, your competitors, a lead gen site, take your mouse and hover right over to the tab, right up on top there. That tab is critically important to your marketing on a page by page basis. And before I get deeper on it, the analogy I want to give you is you've written a beautiful book, but you've titled it incorrectly, and you put it on the wrong shelf on the bottom of a Barnes and Noble somewhere, and you're praying that somebody may bump into it.
This particular area of title tags is one of the overriding weaknesses of where many people bypass it or do it incorrectly. Using this particular example here I'm going to hit the button just to clear this up, okay, just to get the screen away, the actual web page away. This here, his homepage is specifically branding for just one high level topic.
Charlotte, remodeling contractor, his name is SFCC Remodeling.
Right there, it's called a title tag, and the big thing is I could go on and actually have a easily a two hour webinar just on this one topic alone, and that's where what's called SEO, all the different theories about it. Putting that aside, there's a handful that either you or any technical person could do decently with and still make a massive impact as opposed to doing it completely wrong.
Title tags are among the many, so I don't want you to think by knowing this one thing is going to be a silver bullet in a way everything changes. It's just the top of the iceberg. And then the other thing is is that there's a handful of topics associated with this. Case in point, many times you'll go to a website and you'll flip through twenty, thirty pages on the website, and the title tag will stay the same.
The search engines will then take the one closest to the home page and avoid everything else. So you might have a kitchen page, a bathroom page, some commercial pages, an about us page, and all that other fun stuff. And if the title tags are the same as the home page, guess what? It's a whole bunch of online postcards that nobody's ever going to find.
The other thing is the proper length. There's a particular length that forces people to realize that when you're looking at a desktop versus tablet versus smartphone, there's so many characters that could be read, and so that length is important that you don't write a Bible up there. The other thing is the correct ordering. When looking at a title tag, it goes from most important to least important.
So as we're going from left to right in this particular page, he cares more about being known as a Charlotte remodeling contractor, and his name is least important there. And at the same time, he has the branding of who he is. So whenever it pops up in search, if somebody doesn't even click, which we're going to get to in a moment, at least they sort his name. And then without getting too technical, and, again, I'll visually show it to you in a moment, comes this what's called the supporting meta description that complements the title tag.
Let me show an example to make a point. And there we go.
Did it come up? Forgive me. There we go. Okay. Sorry, everybody.
What I'd like people to see is how does this look when someone finds me. In this particular case, what Google is doing is looking at that title tag and changing it the way they see fit. It's not identical. They don't always copy it, but they sometimes do, and they sometimes change it. In this particular case, if you go searching for this guy, the way it appears is the first thing is the title here comes up with his brand of his name, and then that he's a Charlotte remodeling contractor.
Right below it is what's called the meta description, and it's the human description of what you're trying to abbreviate. And what I mean by that is, especially as a contractor, we could all say a tremendous number of technical topics that may sound important to us, but a homeowner or a business owner may not really know what you're saying. So what you could do is put a human description that when somebody glances, that they could actually see exactly what this is about. And if you use words in your human description that happen to be part of the title tag, Google automatically makes them bold to stick out that they could see a part of the description actually equals to what they were searching for in the first place.
And then coming here is the same thing and where Google is picking up that these are his four main things that they're indexing very well, his portfolio, his residential work, his commercial work, and his service area, who It covers actually, it covers the majority, not everything, but it covers the majority of what somebody would want to show the outside world when they have no idea who they're looking for, and even worse, they don't know who you are. So this guy's showing a great, great representation of who he is.
Same thing. I like to say what's good enough for the goose is good enough for the gander. If anyone goes searching my online toolbox, obviously, we're a marketing firm. You might see a lot of things, and you probably will, with different references to who we are. Everything you see has been a strategy that it's not random. It was planned for many, many years ago for you to see things in a very specific order, in a very specific pattern. So by the time you reach out to us, you know we are the people, but it did not just happen overnight.
Going forward, when I was talking about those images, using this example, I said there were, two takeaways previously. First was the, the cell phone message. The second was the title tag. The third, extremely powerful, which is images and how are they indexed.
Yes. That's a beautiful kitchen remodel, and it's obvious that he knows how to do a nice pretty kitchen. But what I like to do, whenever I go anywhere, before I look at the picture, what I do is make a decision, would I ever want to look at the picture through search? So instead of you, you're mostly you were probably very comfortable using your left click, mouse, button.
Going forward, when you see images, click on your right mouse, and one of the options that pops up is, inspect.
Behind the scenes, you're going to see a little buzzword called ALT. It stands for alternative description.
That is telling the search engines what is this about. You would be shocked about what we see. we see everything from nothing. We see everything from wrong descriptions. We see everything from duplicate descriptions.
There's a little company. I'm not going to give them a plug here, but there's a, one of the lead generation marketing firms that loves to allow all the remodelers and construction guys to load their pictures for free. Well, if you're doing that service, remember, when you load the pictures, think about the questions that you're answering to load a picture, and what you're doing is taking your file names, reconverting the file names, reconverting the SEO, alt description, and highly optimizing the images for somebody else's website who will eventually try to sell you leads and advertising space on the very traffic that you created.
So if you start thinking about it, remember going forward, when you use pictures for yourself, make sure you use them to be found correctly. And before you give them away to anybody else, make sure that you've, one, used them correctly for yourself and, two, give everybody else a subset of what you're using yourself because the people you're giving it away to, unfortunately, are going to be much better than you could ever be with these images. So give them less as opposed to giving them the equal amount that you're using for yourself.
Same thing goes with these videos. Similar to titling the web page, same thing as titling the images, video titles are critical for the search engines. Never forget, there's a little company called Google that owns another little company called YouTube, and they're in battle with another little company called Facebook. Video marketing is massive, so whenever you do decide to have a video, make sure you learn how to title it correctly and keep it short and sweet with some real concrete subject matter so somebody who doesn't know who you are, what the service is, or the location is, there's some representation helping people find you whenever they're doing video searches, which is massive, by the way.
Whole time, I've been talking about content. Content is king. Your images, your words, about you, about your services, about your locations. But social engagement is queen.
And what I mean by that is a lot of people love to say I'm on Facebook. What I do, the way you could judge yourself is look at your most recent posts, and as a starting point, look below the post. Let it sit for a week or two and go right below the details of the post, and go to see how many people liked it, loved it, and said, oh my god, and did and even possibly shared it. So if you spend all this time with these beautiful pictures and you're posting all over the place on Facebook and you see that you got one or two or three likes, and then you click on the button and notice out of the one or two or three likes, one's your wife, one's your neighbor, one's your best friend, you're not effective.
It's just people who like you that are liking the post, but you're not doing it correctly. So keep in mind to kinda like, listening to yourself on a recording as opposed to looking at yourself in the mirror, look at the results to see if you or the person that's doing your social engagement is actually doing it correctly.
Many times, the posts are done wrong. Many times, the words in the post are done wrong, and what happens is the result is people are not following you. And if they're not engaging in your post, why bother in the first place? But when you do them correctly, like in this case, having forty one people react, and actually it's forty three in total in this case, react and having it show up on their feeds that are being spread to all of their friends and neighbors.
When this particular company gets leads through Facebook, it's happening because they're saying just the right thing with just the right amount of words and also linking back to their website that if somebody says, hey, who's this person my neighbor's talking about? Let me quickly click to learn more. If you don't give them a path, which is up on top, to find out more, inadvertently, you get somebody's attention, but they get interrupted so quick that they didn't get a chance to find out more about your company and contact you on your own website.
When it comes to Google, keep in mind that Google reviews is among one of the top five localized indicators for rankings. So when you look right here in this particular case, I happen to use this and a couple of other ones as a good example. Remember I was talking earlier about the restaurant example where, you put a little circle on the map and they draw a little three to four to five mile radius? Here's a great example where this particular company is marketing to both a combination of West New Jersey right outside of Jersey City and upper New York City, upstate. And it's crossing two states, and that circle is actually extremely close to what they want. And that type of example is occurring because two things. Google sees they did it correctly with their locations, and separately, they're getting reviews from all over the place with inside that territory.
Don't discount not getting Google reviews as one of a key indicator visually to you, but to Google that customers are saying you are a good company. Not you saying it, but customers are validating everything that you're putting on your website.
How do we look at results? I try to make sure people don't get into analysis paralysis. And what I mean by that is, I never go a week, and keep in mind, we're dealing with thousands of people. So so when I say I never go a week, I never go a week, where somebody randomly sends me this, hey.
Check it out. What do you think? And usually what they're doing is somebody is soliciting them with some SEO service that they found them online and it's just an auto generated email, and they dump twenty to thirty reports and just send it, and then they send it to me. And I go, well, before I say anything, I'm going to charge you a lot just to even open up the email.
I don't want to look at any auto generated email that has no substance to the specifics of what your business is. So I like people to know that when you're looking at ranking reports, it's easy to get swayed by an SEO person that you're doing well. Many times, you actually know whether you're doing well or not based on the activity that you're getting, but you kinda use these reports to misguide yourself. So what I tell people is take a step back and quickly just get a handful of the top level topics.
Kitchen remodeling in whatever town, name the five towns. Bathroom remodeling in whatever five towns. And in this particular example here, this contractor is in where is he? He's in Georgia, and he was never in Kirkwood, Georgia.
He wanted to be there. He did a project, and we highly optimized that project in Kirkwood. And when we reran the reports a few months later, he went from being non existent into being in position two for both kitchens and bathrooms in a town that he could never penetrate before. We also did let him know to never expect to be number one. The reason is his competitor who's based in Kirkwood happens to also have a good business, who happens to have good marketing, and they deserve to be number one. That doesn't mean you can't be happy for the rest of your life being number two, three, and four, especially when you were nonexistent for your entire life.
Using ranking reports, the key thing is use them wisely and don't get obsessed with looking at fifty different versions of topics because all you're going to be doing is appeasing an SEO guy who's probably trying to, what I like to say, CYA cover your type of thing, and he's using the reports to make you feel excited. But you could just take a step back and say, let me just look at what's important and not worry about the hundreds of things that are just nice to see on a report that are not generating you any activity.
Here's another example of a brand new this guy actually it's funny. He, the name of the company is called Star Construction Company. And on our YouTube channel, we literally just last week posted his video testimonial.
He does talk about two things. One, he's generating business online for the first time in his life. But number two, he was, for me, and I've been doing this now for almost ten years, he was my biggest procrastinator ever, and we spent way too much time pushing him. He just was a procrastinator, very nice guy, very successful business, but he was living his life on all of the referral business and all of the things that many of you probably agreed to too based on being in a good economy. But he knew he can't hedge his bets on who he knows in the field because way too much is changing that it's almost like you having a flip phone knowing it's working, but you're refusing to get a smartphone and don't realize that you're never going to be able to use mapping if you don't get the smartphone.
Well, he went online, and here he is a half year later ranking pretty good knowing he was nonexistent for more than twenty years, and he's getting leads for the first time ever online. So it's pretty exciting, but that's on our YouTube channel if you wanted to hear the guy point blank talk about, what it took to get to where he is today.
I mentioned now three things already, how the importance of accumulating content allows you to be a living, breathing reporter for your own marketing. I started to introduce various topics of SEO, search engine optimization.
Again, if there's any programmers listening to this webinar, I'm not looking to diminish your value as what you do with SEO. I'm looking to ensure that the contractors realize it's not a big mystery. They can easily understand the concepts. Maybe they may or may not do it themself, but at least they can engage with you better to understand the importance. So when you're waving your little SEO, and I don't want to say little, waving your SEO wand doing your technical stuff, that they have some generic idea about what the result is that's going to generate them a very specific quality lead. Then comes the social engagement with using Facebook and YouTube appropriately.
And last but not least is a responsive web design.
Just a year ago, it was twenty eighteen, excuse me, twenty seventeen to eighteen, where for the first time, mobile devices were going over fifty percent of all search capabilities.
So whenever you're designing something as an owner and you're or a programmer's designing on your behalf, remember to look at it on your smartphone equally the way you look at it on a tablet or a desktop because half the people may be finding you sitting down at a desk, the other half may be finding you just with a phone or a small tablet. It has a different visual appeal, and also the shorter the topics as it relates to SEO, the better for search engines as it relates to a mobile device because there's only so much information that could be, passed online on a smaller device.
What not to do? Unfortunately, that little picture, if you guys know who it is with Full Metal Jacket, that's not supposed to be there until I hit a button, but I politely try to explain to people what not to do.
It doesn't work half the time. Too many people in this industry just simply wait forever to do their marketing, and then they start doing these lead generations. Hey, Brian. What do you think of this company?
I only spent three to five thousand dollars, but now I'm trying this company, and I only spent two thousand. Now I'm trying company c. All of them are benefiting off of that keyword that I said earlier in the day, content. And what will happen is if you go to look at the terms and conditions, they are brutal on and, again, brutal.
I can't I can't yell at you hard enough, and I can't curse in this, but I would if I could, that they are taking your information, your reviews, your pictures, your words, your everything, and they're doing one of two things. They're monetizing it to get more, advertising or marketing from you, and when you say no because you think you have a free account, they are then monetizing it and selling the very lead traffic to your competition, and they politely thank you with your little free listing that you're very happy to brag about, you need to take a moment and realize that it's somebody saying, would you love to create the content, work in the field, sweat, do everything you need to do to make this beautiful project, get the customer's review, get the pictures, get the words, and for free, we will be more than happy to take it for you.
The newspapers would love to hire free reporters, but they don't. They pay reporters for writing stories. This industry is addicted to not doing what's right for themself, and they're addicted to giving it away to other companies to either use it for their own benefit, to sell you a lead back, or to sell it to your competition. So what Implore you to do is, just for fun, is one day, just win that little checkbox and you're signing up quickly and it says, I agreed to the terms and conditions, read them and look at the content section, and I will bet you, many of you will be upset going, I can't believe I'm agreeing to this.
And remember, no one is holding you hostage. There's no gun to your head like the, you know, the godfather saying you must do this. You're doing it to get something for free, and it doesn't take a business person to realize nothing in this world is for free. Somebody has to benefit, either you or somebody else.
So just please bear, bear with me and just read. Take five minutes and read what it says, and then you'll be very hesitant to give away your stuff.
So now you're going to still say, well, Brian, I heard you, and then two seconds later, somebody sends me an email. But what do you think about this? I go right back to it and say, well, since I couldn't convince you, yet somehow it's in your mind that you're benefiting, and you might be a little bit. I'm not saying that you're not no one's not benefiting at all, but the majority don't over a period of time.
They base their business models over turnover. So if for some reason you're addicted to some lead generation service, and that's the word I use, forgive me, but that's the word that stays with me. If you're addicted to it and even if you're benefiting for the rest of your life, never give away your stuff until you first used it correctly on your own website, your own Facebook, your own YouTube. After you've gone through that little checklist, I would then say, okay.
Give it away because I can't convince you to give it I can't stop you, but at a minimum, I could have you doing it a little bit better as opposed to giving it to the other person who's better than you at marketing and using it against yourself long term.
Yesterday's marketing. As I conclude this, remember, all of these topics, I know I'm going very fast. And, for those of you who may know me, this is my standard type a personality because I love this stuff in marketing, but I also am disappointed where a lot of times, a lot of our success is really not just based on how good we are as a marketing firm and an education firm and a planning firm. It's a fifty fifty relationship with people who take a step back and say, it's time to change my game and make it happen correctly. So when people look at these companies, this, company is a Baton Rouge, residential remodeler and commercial construction company, The work that went into their marketing a few years ago is why they're ridiculously successful on their inbound marketing today. Same thing goes when you're looking at a new home builder remodeler or, this painter.
All of this stuff, even when you go online and you start to check them out, the thing you don't see is the effort it took to put it together correctly. So the first thing people love to do is call up and say, hey. I found you online. I just want to talk to you.
All of my clients know, no, they want to talk to you. They want to first make sure you're not just looking to join a gym. That's easy. Just buy a membership.
Are you going to live a healthy lifestyle? That's a decision people make. If you're not going to make the marketing impact, then all of this stuff becomes nothing other than sugar coated fluff because an effort went in to change their image and change how they generate future business, and they treat it very seriously and not just looking at their website.
So now using that oop, I just skipped one other one. Another, same scenario. Let me do a summary before I take any questions if there's any to be asked. I like to make sure people know that, again, everything being done yesterday is what's going to help impact us months and quarters out.
Don't use the perception that your website is in by itself everything to do with marketing. Connecting the dots and bringing the website, your Google My Business, utilizing Facebook correctly, utilizing YouTube correctly, all of those topics, not in volume, just on a continuous basis correctly will change your inbound marketing game. Don't rely on your developer to think that he understands the industry. More than likely, he understands technology very good.
He possibly understands a little bit about the industry if he's dealt with more than one person in construction, but he's limited in challenging you on bringing out the best of who you are because he just doesn't know what to ask, so don't hold it against him. The same thing is don't think you know your competitors because many of them are doing a better job at marketing than you may not be aware of.
Contractors, remember, you are a unique content machine. You're a living, breathing reporter that has pictures, testimonials, and videos either of yourself, projects, customers. All of that stuff sets you apart, and it could really change how people find you and see you as a business six months to one year out, comma, for the rest of your life.
SEO, search engine optimization topics, supplement this unique content.
Do not just hire an SEO guy to help you generate leads if you're not doing anything new on your website. All he's doing is sugarcoating what's already there today, and there's a good chance he's not doing it correctly.
So keep that in mind that the SEO topics is separate from you doing what's right with your information.
Title tags, alt tags, the descriptions of videos, all of those things, don't get intimidated with. It's similar to you not being intimidated with mapping on your smartphone. You put in point a, you put in point b, you get two or three different ways to go. It even brings up the traffic.
Most of you are relying on that information. Most of you have no idea how it works, but you rely on it. So now just imagine taking a breather for thirty minutes to an hour and actually understanding how marketing is work marketing works. You'll be lethal in what happens in the middle of two thousand twenty, twenty twenty, excuse me, and it's going to be here in a blink of an eye. Social engagement is critical for the validation and word-of-mouth of what everything else has been said above, and be careful how lead generation firms utilize your information.
Combined, all of this will help you change your destiny for how you market your company for life. Remember, start yesterday. Do not have this just waiting for November or it's just a waste of time.
My name is Brian of MyOnlineToolbox, again, with an objective of helping companies grow their business with more quality leads through education classes and consulting arrangements with marketing planning. We also have to thank Clear Estimates, for first helping us, get exposure to your fine group here online and separately for being a leader, with professional proposals in minutes. And for the people that are joining us on the MyOnlineToolbox side, please visit the Clear Estimates website later to have them considered as an option that if we're helping you generate all of these lead opportunities and inadvertently your bottleneck is to do proposals with contractors now I'm sorry, with consumers, now that you got the leads, Please take a moment knowing that it took us forever to help you change your marketing and help you generate these great leads.
You know how to answer the phone correctly, but now you have to be in sales mode and follow-up, and we would love you to consider Clear Estimates as one of those options to consider. And, forgive me for the extra plug, Alex. I just wanted my guys to to know that.
Oh, yeah. No problem.
and now from here, I want to thank you all. And if there's any particular questions from Alex, I'm ready to take them or, take them offline, whichever one.
Absolutely, Brian. Well, that was absolutely fantastic. I'm going to have trouble here getting a blog post right up because it's, you know, so much good content was there. You know, that was action action packed for an entire hour.
I really appreciate how it was specifically for our contractors, so residential, you know, everything from siding contractors to home remodelers, you know, new home construction. And I really enjoyed how many, you know, especially in the chat here, how many customers we share together. You know, Steve at SFCC Remodeling, we definitely appreciate you showing his website. Appreciate you, Steve, if you're in the audience, letting us kind of use your information as an example here.
But, yeah, Brian, that was fantastic. I do have a few questions here. One of them, from Rudy. He's asking if the slides are going to be available afterwards.
Yes. Absolutely.
Okay. Okay. Yeah. So Rudy, the slides will be available afterwards. I'll coordinate with Brian on, you know, how we can obtain that.
And I'm sure if you if you have any questions, this goes for everyone that joined us today. If you have any questions, you're more than welcome to reach out to Brian. All of our further correspondence will have a blog post write up. We'll have the YouTube recording, and then we'll also just send out a follow-up email.
We'll include all of Brian's information, just in case you guys are interested in the consultation or any of his, classes as well.
So another question here, Brian, from Paul. He was curious what ranking tool you were looking at just a few slides ago, the SEO ranking tool.
There's actually too many. I'd rather if he sends me an email, I'll just keep dragging on because that is, like, a big debate on which one it is, which one. And what's funny is there's free there's two to three that cost different amounts monthly and quarterly type of thing and yearly. And depending on his business, that question is a generic one and also not knowing exactly where he's standing. Sometimes when I say the free tool, I don't like people to rely on the free tool indefinitely, and depending on where he is, I'd rather give a more direct answer based on knowing a little bit about him and not just have it public on that I'm promoting a free or a particular particular product.
Certainly. Yeah. So what I'll do is just introduce you guys, just via email if that works for you, Brian.
Yes. Or you can go to my website and just use the contact.
Okay. Perfect. Yeah. Paul, whatever you prefer. If you'd like, you you know, just to go to his website, that's that's certainly an alternative there.
Yes. And Great. Alex, if if the gentleman could just say Clear Estimates webinar, just because when we get a lot of this the fluff that comes in, and I would like to be able to have that sorted to the top of a reply. So if anybody's here, please, if you're going to send me something, just say Clear Estimates webinar in the subject matter just so it sticks out, and I'm able to separate it and give it a little extra personal attention.
Awesome, Brian. And what's a good email for everyone to reach you at?
I'd rather them use the website address and not have that on the webinar.
Oh, perfect. Okay. Yeah. No problem. So I'll go ahead and just add your website to the chat feature here.
And then for any time yeah. So Diane, you probably know Diane that she says that she referred a client to you, which is fantastic. She says that you've done an incredible job with them, that you know what you're doing. So, you know, sounds like everything that you're doing over there, Brian, is fantastic.
She also mentions uses some free tools just, to help her with the keywords. So she uses keywords everywhere, Ubersuggest and TubeBuddy.
Which which Diane, by the way. I know way too many.
Diane, if you're still in here, let us know, let us know who you are. Yeah. Yeah.
So those, you know, what are your thoughts on those, you know, kind of what I like to tell people with the keyword stuff, Alex, is the reports themselves are helpful.
You're never going to find identical information, number one. And number two, because they all have their different ways of how they make a decision ranking - one, two, three or four type of thing. But what's more importantly, important, excuse me, is to use a good subset of keywords that are important. And let me use the SFCC only because it was just a joint client.
When we're doing the rankings, first of all, he's in a very difficult area. Charlotte is a tough area, because of the sheer diversity and size of the location. So if we put in kitchen remodeling contractor, and then we put kitchen, remodeling contractor Charlotte, and then we even put kitchen remodeling contractor Charlotte in a specific community, and some of these communities are so big that people actually want to target them, you're going to see different results, and more than likely, the kitchen remodeling contractor will have the much higher or slash worser ranking. The kitchen remodeling contractor Charlotte will be better, and the kitchen remodeling contractor Charlotte and a community name will even be better than that because of the way we're targeting.
So what I tell people is don't just be in a rush to use a tool and think that's the magical answer. Take a step back and make look at the keywords and try to think, is the subset and organization of the keywords representative of really what you want to analyze in the first place. I mean, I have people who say, oh, I can analyze two hundred and fifty keywords. I'm like, wonderful.
You know? And if they only do kitchens and bathrooms in four towns, how can why are you looking at two hundred and fifty? You're going to get so your your brain gets a little bit, you know, over overwhelmed that you can't do anything on the results is my point.
Right. Right. Yeah. So Diane just said that she sent Brian Horizon Roofing.
Oh my I can't remember. Wow. Okay.
Yeah. Yeah. I totally understand.
You know, so much going on.
I apologize. Yeah. that one's there. But, yes, Horizon. I know Horizon Roofing is in California. I just can't remember which person, so I do apologize.
Awesome. Awesome. Yeah. Well, this has been a fantastic presentation. Again, we'll have everything available afterwards.
I'll work with Brian on, you know, how we're going to work with the slides there. But, obviously, this recording will be available. We'll get it up on YouTube here within the hour, and then we'll have a blog post right up as well.
So anybody that joined, had to leave, you know, take a couple calls in in, you know, during the webinar, we'll always have the recording available afterwards. And I'll send out an email here today with that information so everybody will have access to it.
Anything else, Brian, before we head out here?
Just being a marketing guy, if if you don't mind, if I could send you a suggestion, you don't have to follow it word for word, but a suggestion on how to load it onto YouTube, that would be Certainly.
A favor. Yeah. Absolutely.
But as far as the webinar goes I appreciate everyone that showed up here. This has been a fantastic presentation with Brian here of of My Online Toolbox. His website is very simple just my online toolbox dot com. We really appreciate it Brian. This has been a fantastic presentation.
With that, we'll go ahead and close it out here. Thanks again, everyone!