Get Leads from Multiple Service Areas Using Local SEO

Learn how to use local SEO to generate leads across multiple service areas. This episode covers strategies for creating service- and location-specific pages, improving search rankings, and capturing long-tail keywords to expand your reach and grow your business. Join host Adam Sylvester with David Brooks of Contractor Rhino, and Kasy Allen of Wheatley Creek Services.

 

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Episode Transcript

(00:00):
Because I've optimized our website andI do our monthly reporting and I look at
our numbers on a monthly basis,
50 to 60% of the traffic that comesto our website is all from organic.
All organic SEO.
Welcome to jobbers, masters of HomeService, a podcast for home service pros,
buy Home Service Pros.
Today we're in Las Vegas and we'retalking about local SEO getting leads from

(00:23):
multiple service areas. I'myour host, Adam Sylvester.
Today's guests are Cassie Allen.
She's the COO of Wheatley CreekServices. And David Brooks,
the owner of ContractorRhino. Welcome to Studio Guys.
Thank you.
Thanks for having us. Yeah, absolutely.David, why don't you go first,
tell our audience whoyou are and what you do.

(00:43):
Sure. My name is David Brooks.I'm the CEO of Contractor Rhino,
which is a digital marketingand accounting services agency in the trade space.
We are located out of Philadelphia.
Hi, I'm Cassie Allen. I'mwith Wheatley Creek Services.
We're a home service andresidential cleaning company based in Granby, Colorado,
which is a very small area.

(01:04):
But before I switched intothe home service industry,
I came from the digital marketing worldwhere I worked for the last 20 years in
digital marketing. When Iwas in worked with agencies,
I worked with hundreds of clientsin the home service industry.
Great. So lots of knowledge here.
Let's get into a little bitbecause a lot of our listeners,
they have a pretty big servicearea and they might need to,

(01:28):
instead of just advertisingin Dallas, Texas for example,
they probably need to start advertisingin much more localized markets,
big neighborhoods orcertain parts of town.
How can they go about that so thatthey're not just casting this really wide
net, but they're castinga much smaller net?
Do you guys have any suggestions on that?
Yeah, I do. When looking at your website,

(01:49):
it is really good if you could implementa service areas page or areas we
serve page.
That way you can break down thedifferent areas inside of your big
area into smaller segments that youcan target on your website so that
you can reach out to people inthose smaller but bigger size
populations overall with targetedcontent that will be able to attract

(02:13):
more leads into your business.
And we kind of took that a step furtherwhere we actually created pages for all
the communities in our county.So that's a much bigger task.
Now, I'm adding 10 pages to my website,
but each of those pagestargets a certain town,
and what that helped us with is tostart ranking for when people are doing

(02:34):
searches for home servicenear me or with that
local town, so home servicenear me, winter Park,
which is one of our local townsor home service near me, Granby.
When you are doing that,even with Siri or Alexa,
then you start ranking easier in thoselocal areas and those neighborhood towns.

(02:54):
Speaking of Dallas and you'relooking to rank in Grapevine,
you can have a page dedicatedto Grapevine, Texas.
What we're going for,
and our listeners who are watchingYouTube can see this is gutter cleaning in
Charlottesville, Virginiais our biggest keyword,
and it's going to be here on thegraph, but then as you go down,
it's called the long tail and all theselittle pages that will hit all these

(03:16):
smaller keywords. Each oneof them is very small number,
but when you accumulate all ofthem together, it's a big number.
And so what we want our listeners tostop doing is focusing solely on the big
search terms and start saying, Hey,
there's a lot of business out here onthe fringe where we're having all these
local SEO pages. Right?

(03:37):
Absolutely. And I feel like if yougo and you look at competitors,
you'll see this, you'll see itprobably just one link in the header,
and then you'll see allthe links in the footer,
and it's all the locationpages that they built out.
Usually it's not beginninglike small business,
a new website launches and it's likefive pages, 10 pages. But over time,
you want to build your websiteand you want to make it bigger.

(03:57):
And as you are doing that,
you'll start to see your competitors andyou'll notice that those pages are in
the footer and they've built 'em allout and they are going after those long
tail keywords. For sure. Yeah.
What's the biggest mistake, David,
that you've seen your clients makemaybe doing this on their own,
on trying to tackle thishyper-local SEO concept?
What are some mistakes people are making?

(04:18):
Some of the most commonmistakes that I usually see is
for someone if they'redoing it on their own,
trying to rank all those differentmajor metros on the homepage.
So it could be Orlando,winter Park, Tampa,
and they're trying to get all those bigpopulation cities just on the homepage,

(04:40):
which it makes it harder for Google todistinguish what are we really targeting
here? Is the primary preference Tampa,is it Orlando, is it Winter Park?
And they're trying to really cramp inall those different services and things
into one page for.
Multiple areas. It really cluttersit. The clutter is not good.
Your suggestion is to keep your homepagefocused on one and then have sub

(05:04):
pages that hit all these other cities.
Correct.
Okay. Why is SEO soimportant? Our listeners,
I got bigger things to do, biggerfish or fry. What would you guys say?
Why is SEO so important tothe people's businesses?
Yeah,
I would say it's vitally importantbecause it could be the lifeline of your
business. If you invest in SEO,

(05:25):
you could have potential customers cominginto your website or whether it's day
or whether it's night orwhether it's the weekend,
even in slow periods when you'relooking for more business.
By investing in SEO in areally good marketing strategy,
it can not only help grow yourbusiness into one Pacific area,
but if you're trying to cover multiplecommunities, multiple neighborhoods,

(05:48):
multiple areas, by investing in SEO,
you're going to be able to get potentialcustomers in all those different areas.
And I will elaborate that a lot oftimes when a new website launches,
it's dependent on ads to gettraffic to it, and ads are costly,
and it's not a long-termplan. It's a short-term plan.
So you should be using ads and youcan continue to use ads, right?

(06:10):
Because you're going to add new servicesand then maybe you use ads again.
But really what you want to do is savemoney on the ads and let SEO work in your
favor. When you set up SEO, it may takethree months to have a website rank,
but once it's ranking, you're good.
You want to continue to build onyour website and improving your SEO,
but that initial spend on SEOsaves you money in the long run.

(06:31):
You're not spending that money on ads.
And a lot of people say,oh, website costs so much,
but it's really a one-time fee.
You spend a big chunk of money ona website to get it. SEO optimized.
Absolutely.
And then it just feeds the machineforever. And so it's really a long,
I like your phrase there,
long-term play because I think we canbe shortsighted as entrepreneurs and

(06:51):
business owners, especiallyin the trades like, oh,
I can't spend that muchmoney on a website,
but you're setting yourself up forsuccess for years down the road.
You're not just payingthis fee for no reason.
You don't have to do a whole lotof changes to your website. Some,
but not massive changesevery year. One fee.
And then mostly after that it's done.
And I'm sure Davidcould add to this story,

(07:13):
but because I've optimized our websiteand I do our monthly reporting,
and I look at our numberson a monthly basis,
50 to 60% of the traffic that comesto our website is all from organic,
all organic SEO, right? So leadscoming from Google primarily,
and that was set and forget it right afterI did that initially when we launched
our website.

(07:33):
And now that traffic continues tocome in and that's 50% of our leads.
So I'm not worrying about the wordof mouth and the social media and
all those other leads because I have thissolid traffic that's always coming in.
And by implementing it early,
you save yourself a lot of headacheand trouble later on down the line.
Normally, sometimes I seecontractors and they come and say,

(07:56):
I want leads tomorrow,
and they think ads is thatsurefire solution that's really going to get it done,
but you really need to invest in organic.What happens when you turn ads off,
when your leads go away and you can'trefer back to the website because it's not
optimized or it's not set up for success,
and then two years go by and then threeyears go by and the website is still

(08:18):
not SEO optimized. So like she said,
she set it up correctly and then 50to 60% of that traffic comes from
organic.
We all want leads today,
but we also want leads three monthsfrom now and in three months,
today is going to be three monthsaway. And so have to, I mean,
short term vision onlead generation is fine.
That's a big part of runningbusiness. It's getting leads today.

(08:41):
But SEO is such a long-term play.
We can't say it enough.
Our listeners have to realize thathaving a properly built website with
proper keywords, with properlocations and all that stuff,
professional can help you. If you wantto try to do it yourself, you can.
It's worth every dime if it's done right.

(09:01):
Absolutely.
How do we go about, one thing I've seen,and you guys have seen this before,
is you go to a websitesub page and it says that
location like a hundred times. It'slike Ville, and it's like, whoa, whoa,
whoa.
So is there a point whereit gets excessive where you say the same keyword over
and over and over again? DoesGoogle will say, whoa, whoa, whoa,

(09:22):
that's just too much.
Absolutely. That's over optimization.
Yes. Yes.
So it needs to read naturally. You wouldprobably use a keyword on the page,
what you see as a human,when you go to a website,
probably three times you'd have in atitle and then you maybe three times
littered in the content. I say thatand then somebody's going to think, oh,
I wrote a paragraph. I needto mention it three times.

(09:44):
That's not what I'm saying.
You need a full page of content andthen you can mention it three times.
If you only have a paragraph,you probably mentioned it once,
it has to read naturally.And Google wants this too.
It's all about user experience.
The user experience has to begood when the user gets there,
and Google is thinking of that too.So if the user experience is not good,
you're not going to rank higher thanyour competitors, and you'll see that,

(10:07):
and you can use tools to see that as well.
Well, this is a great conversation.
I want to pause for a moment to talkabout Jobber specifically websites.
Jobber has a new website builder. David,
why is having websites soimportant to Home Service Pros?
Well, it helps customers tobe able to find your business,
find out about you online. Ifyou're not online, you're nowhere.

(10:28):
So you're just basically relying offa referral. So if you can do anything,
just make sure you can try to get awebsite up that can post pictures of the
jobs you completed, basiccontact information,
hours of service and the servicesthat you provide. Yeah, Cassie.
So Jobber has this new feature whereyou could actually build a website from
within Java, and it is super easy.I actually did it for our business,

(10:51):
and it's a very small website,
but what's great about it is that youcan send it out to potential clients,
you can connect it down to yourFacebook, your social media channels,
and clients can go and they can submittheir information and the information is
then put directly into Jobber. So itreally makes that whole process seamless.
And you can have a websiteup by the end of the day.
Yeah, well said. Yeah, if you'renot using Jobber, you need to,

(11:14):
if you don't have a website,you really need jobber.
So go to jobber.com/podcast, steal,
get an exclusive discount for new usersand start building your website through
Jobber. Now, David, 10 yearsago when I started my business,
or a little bit further back onthat, blogs were all their age,
are blogs still relevant?
Blogs are still relevant because theyhelp customers be able to find your

(11:37):
business when they're looking for theirspecific solution to their problem.
Why is my roof leaking?Why doesn't my heater work?
Why is it my AC blowing out hot air?
So those different things can allowblogs on those different topics.
Can the potential customers to be ableto find your website, read the article,

(11:57):
then realize that, Hey,I'm way over my head here.
I need a professional tocome handle this for me.
I agree. We still blog. We still do atleast once a month, sometimes twice.
It usually depends on if a new topic comesup or if we start getting phone calls
and after five phone calls, we'relike, that needs to be a blog post.
Right.
Now we're getting a lot ofphone calls on what do you do?

(12:19):
People are buying new homes and theydon't know how to winterize their home.
They are buying in the middle of theRocky Mountains and the snow is coming and
the snow gets deep, and they're like,oh, wait, I'm not prepared for that.
What do I do with my sprinkler system?And so then that's a blog post,
and we're creating a blogpost on teaching that moment.
So blogs were the originalcontent, in my view,

(12:40):
back in 2001 or two.There was no Instagram.
So that was the firstversion of content creation.
What other forms of content helpyou develop this local SEO concepts?
I would say, I mean, podcastis one of the easiest ways.
Video and podcast videois a little harder, right?
Because you have to set up a biggerproduction in your head. You think that,

(13:01):
but really your phonecan video record you.
But what's neat about a podcast and avideo is that you can take it and then you
can pull the transcription and putit on a blog and still have the
transcription below. That content isstill being able to be read by Google,
and you could have the localinformation put in there,

(13:22):
the town information.
That's the best way I've been able tosee it the quickest way outside of blogs.
How about you?
Yeah, I think another thingthat's often underlooked at is
frequently asked questions.
So maybe instead of turning a bunchof questions into a full on blog
article, you may place it on yourmost important service pages.

(13:42):
So it could be roofreplacement, roof installation,
landscaping,
and just a few of those common questionsthat customers may ask frequently.
And then putting that on thatpage can help it rank higher.
I'm also a big fan of pricing pages.
I think besides about me or about us,
I think pricing is one of the very toppages that people go to other than the

(14:04):
homepage. And each businesscan figure out what goes there.
We're not going to go down that path now,
but I do think pricing pages are reallyimportant. And someone might say,
how much does it cost to clean mygutters in Charlesville, Virginia?
And that pricing page will be atthe top, and they'll click there,
and then they'll click to thehomepage, and now you're gold.
And so I think pricing is reallyany other good ideas for pages

(14:25):
specifically.
Another good piece ofinformation is those community
type pages, hosting other businessesin the area in the community,
then putting driving directionsfrom those places of interest
back to your business,
send signals to Google as localcontent relevance to your business

(14:47):
because of the proximity.
And those landmarks will actuallykind of do your marketing SEOA
favor.
I like that. So we did something similar.
It doesn't necessarily help with SEObecause it's a landing page optimization,
but what it is,
is it pulls people to the page and theyenter their email address and then they

(15:07):
get a free download. I call 'em big itempieces. It's bigger than a blog post.
It's bigger, it takesmore time. So what it is,
it's our preferred trades andcontractors in the local area.
So it's service providers thatdo services that we don't do.
And we got the idea because people werecalling us and they're asking for a
plumber, and we don't do plumbing.They're asking for electrician,
they're asking for snow removal.

(15:27):
And so we pulled all thatinformation into this download.
And so it's a really great informationbecause now they're not just getting
their snowplow, which was their originalquestion. They're getting pest control,
they're getting local cabinet makers,and all of this is gold to them,
and it's also building my email list.
So mobile is a big factor here. Solet's talk about mobile for a second.

(15:48):
So does any of this change whenyou think about from a mobile
device standpoint, allpretty much the same?
Is there anything else that we need todo to make sure our pages are optimized
for local SEO from a mobile standpoint?
Yeah, mobile is super important.
So you want to make sure that thewebsite is displaying well on desktop,

(16:11):
but also it fits in a smartphonetablet where users can scroll
down, look at the content.
You don't want to make the content toolong where it's just this endless scroll
and the user can't really get tothe point of where they want to,
whether that be a formspecific call to action,
we want to make sure that the phone numberthat's on the website is clickable on

(16:32):
mobile,
because if I'm searching on maps for acontractor and then I go and pull up the
website on my phone,
I might just want to click that buttonand instantly call the business.
So some websites don't have that featureor they don't have a form that's really
easy to navigate on a mobile device.
You want to make sure those thingsand those elements are in place.
I agree, and I would add thathow websites are built now,

(16:55):
and now we're getting into websites overSEO, but how websites are built now,
certain things could be hidden onmobile and then shown on desktop.
That way it's not as long or it's adropdown, so if they want to read it,
they can, and then it goes smaller.
So it's definitely worth checking intomobile design. If the website is built,
check it out on your mobiledevice. If you don't like it,
talk to your developer to see if theycan help make it more user friendly.

(17:17):
The dropdown is great for FAQs, I think.
Yes.
Otherwise, it's so long.
And there's a lot. Content's a fineline because Google loves content.
People don't necessarily liketo read all that content.
And more and more we'rejust scrolling by, right,
TikTok taught us this. We canjust scroll and go to the next.
So when we have those dropdowns,

(17:39):
we can make it shorter and we cankeep the attention of our audience.
Let's drill down there for aminute on FAQs. So how exactly,
let's put FAQs at the bottomof each website webpage. How does that help at all?
What does that do exactlyfrom a Google standpoint?
What's happening therethat makes it effective?
Google loves content, so it'scontent. You're beefing up a page.

(18:00):
A lot of times what I've seen with homeservice pages is they build the page and
set it and forget it. Sofive years down the road,
that page still has one stock image andit has one paragraph, and that's it.
That page is probably starting to getoutranked by competitors because it hasn't
been touched in a long time,and it's very light on content.
What those FAQs do is starts addingmore content to the page and it starts

(18:22):
showing relevancy to that page.
Google is going to see that that pagehas more information and that you're
providing more information to make theuser experience better and to help the
user find what it is that they need tonote so that they can make a decision and
convert.
Yeah, I agree with what she just said,
is putting that content on the pagefor relevancy is super important,

(18:43):
and then making sure that it isspecific enough to that service
that you're talking about on that page.
You don't want to really go off topicand talk about another service on that
same page.
Really dialing it down and focusingon what's the most important pain
parts of a potential customer thatthey're going to be asking when they're

(19:04):
searching out for a business.
So we can have FAQs for eachspecific service page too.
So we've been talking about havinga page for each part of town,
and we will come back to that in a second,
but we can also have a whole differentset of pages for each service you
provide, power washing, window cleaning,
all these different serviceshave different pages,

(19:26):
and they can all have theirown unique FAQs, right?
Correct. Yeah.
Each of those pages canhave a unique FAQ to them.
So let's just say furnace replacement,furnace installation, furnace repair,
can all have different FAQson each one of those pages,
and it's also going to be able to helpyour potential customers find you.

(19:48):
But also it's good because it spreadsthe content out instead of trying to cram
everything in on one page.
So a lot of times I'll see heatingand installation or heating and AC
repair, and you're actually,what is the page talking about?
As we're talking about repair,we talk about installation.
You can have those pages, but it'sgood if you can break those out.

(20:11):
Absolutely. And I see witha lot of smaller businesses,
they usually launch with a service pageand the service page list all of their
services. That's a good first start,
but it's not going to helpyou with ranking that well,
when you can break out thoseservices into their own pages,
you get the chance to start rankingfor each of those service lines
in your area. So it beefs upyour SEO power on your website.

(20:35):
And then the third step, and this istaking it to a whole nother level,
is so first we start withspecific pages for each city,
and then we go into havingspecific pages for each service.
But then you can pages for each specificservice and each individual city.
And so you just keep making theweb bigger and bigger and bigger,
and eventually your website's just goingto collect every single search because

(20:57):
you're just hitting every single keywordin every single city for every single
service page.
Any other tips on this having differentpages for different services and
locations?
I think what I would add is that afterwe created pages for every service,
and then we created pages forall the towns in our county,
because where we live, wecommonly refer to a county,
and then we went by the towns. Wehad an idea last year that, wow,

(21:19):
we could actually go afterhigh profile neighborhoods.
Neighborhoods where we know thatwell hire us to do window washing,
so services that arelike premium services.
And so when we can build out pagesthat target those neighborhoods,
and the idea is that somebody is doinga search for that neighborhood and
window washing, so now they're notlooking for Grand County window washing,

(21:42):
they're not looking forwinter park window washing,
they're looking for Lakota windowwashing. I just targeted a neighborhood.
Right? Nice. You can do that with adstoo, if you don't want to create the page,
but you're spending money on theads. If I bring it back to a page,
now I'm saving it and SEO's doing thework to be able to start ranking in that
neighborhood.
And David, along those samelines, we all live in towns.

(22:02):
We all know that the localterminology for certain areas,
so even if it may not be specificallycalled that at the postal service,
you can still target commonlyunderstood names of areas of
town, right?
Correct. You could still targetthose and segment it out.
So just for instance,like in Philadelphia,

(22:23):
if you live inPhiladelphia, certain areas,
what they're called or havebeen called for many years,
but if you were to look on a mapor go through the post office,
it's called something entirely different,
which many people out of townmay look at that and say, oh,
that's what it's called. But for everyonethat lives inside of town, oh no,
we call it this.
So that's how you can hyper localize thatcontent for that specific page because

(22:47):
the citizens that live in those areasactually call those things sometimes
different. What you see on the map.
And that's the word hyperlocal.
And there are some peopleout there who really don't,
they really bristle athiring a non-local company.
There aren't a whole lot out there,
but there are people who really want tohire a local company who lives down the

(23:08):
street from me, and that can bethe difference. Oh, they called it,
no one calls it that they must not belocal or they must be owned by somebody
else who doesn't pay attention.
But if they see those words that theycall their town, then they're, oh,
they understand me. They must belocal. They've lived here a long time.
They know what they're talking about.
That's so true. Local citizens, they know.

(23:31):
Yeah.
So.
How do you track all this stuff?
We want to make sure that theseare all converting to leads,
leads convert to jobs,jobs convert to invoices.
So how do we make sure that we'retracking the right numbers and then also
making decisions based on those resultsthat we're not just going to spend money
willy nilly. How do we track this.
Stuff? Google Analytics four,GA four is what we call it,
is good for segmenting out who'slanding on those pages from what areas.

(23:55):
You can also customize your formsto ask the potential customers what
service area you located in,
and then you can see which service areathat they're located at in the form
field when they're fillingout that information.
If you're talking on a broader scale,
and you're talking about targetingreally big areas on your website,

(24:15):
you may have tracking numbers,
so different phone numbers on thosedifferent pages to be able to track where
the results are coming from.
And I'll add in additionto Google Analytics,
which is free and greatresource for any business owner.
Google also has a Google search console,which could be added to a website.
And a few years ago,probably 10 years ago now,

(24:36):
Google Analytics stopped showingkeywords. But in Google's search console,
you can still see keywords and you canalso see what pages are ranking and not
ranking.
And that's important because you may goand put the time into creating eight new
pages, and you want to know ifthose pages are even ranking.
You could actually go submit it toGoogle Search Console and tell Google,
this is a new page, please rank it,
and then you can monitorit over the next week.

(24:58):
Usually it's a couple days and itstarts ranking, but up to a week,
and you should be able to seethat that page is ranking,
and then you should be able to see ifthere's traffic coming to it and what
keywords are coming in for that page.
Okay. That's interesting.
I want to go back to what David saidearlier about having a different form on
each page.
Are you suggesting thatthere's a different form on every one so that you know

(25:18):
where they came from? Is that excessive,
or is that actually apretty good strategy?
No,
you can have a different form on everyonejust to be able to make sure that you
exactly know which page they came from.
Yeah,
and it's not completely foolproofbecause they could end up calling or they
could end up navigating to a different,back to the homepage or something.
But a lot of times they will use thatform because we like to do things fast.

(25:40):
And so that's interesting. I likethat. Guys, this has been great.
I'm going to boil the conversationdown to three actionable items here.
Number one is build out subpagesfor all your unique services
and all your unique locations andcreate that long tail. So over time,
you get all these little hits andit accumulates into a lot of leads.
Number two is it's okay to uselocal vernacular in your listings.

(26:02):
You can use commonly known areas oftown that may not be at the post office,
but everyone knows what they are.
And number three is make surethat your website reads well.
Make sure your content isn't excessiveand redundant over and over again.
Do you guys have any final tips foreasy SEO quick wins for our listeners?
Yeah, I think a final quick tip wouldbe to actually spread those service

(26:24):
pages out. So instead of crammingin everything in one page,
start creating individualpages for those services.
And I'll add to that, if you writethose service pages all in one day,
which you're not going to, but if youtried, they all start to sound the same.
So take a minute between thecreating those pages, create a page,
wait a couple days, create another page.
That way each of those pages has uniquecontent and you're looking at it fresh

(26:47):
every time you create a new page.
Awesome. Well, Cassie, how dopeople find out more about you?
You can find [e-mail] oron Instagram and Facebook at Wheatley
Creek.
David.
You can find me [e-mail] my email website is
contractor rhino.com, and we're alsoon LinkedIn at Contractor Rhino.

(27:09):
Great. Well, guys, you guys know justlike anyone else, that business matters.
The impact that business ownershave on the community matters a lot,
and you guys are having a big impact.We keep it up. I appreciate it.
Thanks for having us.
And thank you for listening.
I hope that you learned something todaythat will make your local SEO more
optimized and more robust for yourlead generation. I'm your host,

(27:29):
Adam Sylvester. You canfind [e-mail].
Your team and your clients deserveyour very best, so go give it to 'em.