Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
Hey there and welcome back to Pest Control Legends.
I'm your host, Danny Lee Brent, and today I'm with Aaron
Shashila. If you don't ready to know
Aaron, he's the CEO and founder of Wolfpack Advising A7 Figure
digital marketing agency servinginspectors, pest control and
more. Despite only being in business
for six years, Wolfpack has grown to over 100 clients,
gotten over 95 star Google reviews, and even won the Best
(00:22):
of Florida Award for Digital Marketing in 2023.
Aaron is also a recognized national speaker and the founder
of the Wolfpack Summit, an annual conference for inspectors
and pest control. Now in this episode, we're going
to dive into everything you needto know about building a
successful pest control website,as that's where Aaron got
started and where many pest control companies go wrong.
(00:43):
So without further ado, thanks for coming on the show, Aaron.
Thanks for having me, Danny. Absolutely.
So I want to actually, I'd like to talk about the beginning of
your journey because it's, it's funny, like I told you before
the show, we actually have a pretty similar background that
you know, your dad has a inspection company, my dad has a
flooring company. Talk to me about how you started
(01:05):
at your dad's inspection companyand how you got started on his
website and other things like that.
Yeah. Do you want the full background
story or should we keep it? I mean, I mean like, because I
can share the funny stuff. Yeah, yeah.
No, Share the full story becausethat's a good one.
OK, all right, full story is, and I love sharing this story
because I feel like a lot of people think I'm exaggerating
(01:26):
here, but I'm dead serious. It 100% happened. 100% true.
I had no thoughts going into home inspections, which is what
my dad did. They also own a pest control
company and a roofing company. And of course, no person I guess
finds them, finds themselves doing pest control or wants to
do pest control. They just somehow land in it.
And that's exactly what happenedto me.
(01:47):
So I ended up working at a grocery store called Publix.
It's in the in the southeast of the United States.
And I worked in the deli just happened because I moved back
home after college or still going to college while I was
paying my way through. And I was going to be like a
doctor, I was going to be an engineer.
And then I just landed on business because I just found
that as my niche, I guess anyway, was that this grocery
(02:08):
store for about a year did a good job and I was still going
to college. And one day there was about a 30
year old man that was there. And I was 18 at the time.
I look like I'm 18 now. I'm telling you, I probably
looked like I was 12 then. And I was just sweeping in the
back hallway. And while I was sweeping in the
back hallway, this guy comes up and he like steps in my dirt
(02:29):
pile. And you know how you can like
step and squash in a dirt pile to kind of like mess it up a
little bit? He didn't like make it all over
the place. It's not like it went
everywhere, but he was like justjoking around as you would when
you work at a grocery store and you're in the back hallway.
So I was like, OK, I'm going to joke with him back and he's
going in the freezer. So I'm going to kind of close
the door on him when he's going in the freezer so that way he
can't get out. It's pretty chilly in there, but
(02:51):
that's all it it's going to do anyway.
So he goes in the freezer. I'm going to close the door.
Well, supposedly he's coming outof the freezer and you're not
supposed to do this. They show you in all the HR
videos. You're supposed to carry the
boxes of chicken right up next to you to your hips, bend with
the knees, you know, don't, don't arch your back, that kind
of stuff. This dude flung it over his
shoulder like he wasn't supposedto and let out the door of the
(03:14):
freezer with his head first. It just so happened that I was
closing the door right when he was coming out and his head was
coming out first. So I hit him in the head with
this solid door and it, I don't think it was like a steel solid
door. It was made out of metal on the
exterior. I'm pretty sure on the inside it
was probably just foam and insulated and it wasn't that big
of a deal. But this dude, I'm telling you
(03:35):
flipped like I, I guess he had some sort of anger issues or
something because I thought we were just joking around.
He starts yelling at me, backingme up against the wall, pointing
at me, you know, kind of towering over me and just
yelling at me for saying that I hit him in this head with the
door and I did it on purpose andI was trying to hurt him.
(03:55):
And, and you know, I don't know what you say to that because I
was just like, dude, I'm sorry. We're we were joking around.
It wasn't that big of a deal. Like, like we were just both
joking around. I'm sorry.
Like what else do you want me tosay to you?
But he's still screaming at me for like 5-10 minutes and I'm
not even kidding, in the back hallway.
And finally, I guess like something like calmed him down
(04:19):
or whatever because he went to turn around and like leave.
So he turns around and he goes to leave and I'm like, all
right, I guess that's it. Whatever I just got my ass
chewed out for, for whatever andwe'll move on.
But no lie, he took one step away from me like he was walking
away and he got down like notched on his knees and then
turn around and swung at me whenI was totally not paying
(04:39):
attention and hit me right in the nuts.
So to this day I still haven't gotten tested to know if I can
have kids or not. I hope I'm all good.
I should be I think. But yeah, he literally punched
me in the nuts as hard as he could and then walked away.
Like didn't even continue fighting or anything like that.
And I was going to sit there andthrow hands.
(05:00):
And I kind of thought to myself,well, if he feels like that
anger from me hitting him in thehead, like, does it hurt that
bad or something? You know, even though I was
apologizing, it was an accident.He got his, his, his payback
towards me, I guess in a way. 1020 minutes later, nothing's
happening. We're avoiding each other and he
finds me in the back hallway again and this time he's
(05:21):
screaming at me again. And mind you this guy is like 30
years old and I am 18I look likea 12 year old.
And he's yelling at me and he says like come on, let's settle
this like men in this office because there's no cameras in
the office. So he wants to fight me in in
this back office. And I'm like, dude, I'm not
fighting you. Like this is stupid.
(05:44):
Like it was an accident. What are you talking about?
Like you're going off the deep end, man.
And he's like, fine, you want meto get a manager?
I was like, sure, go get a manager if that's what you need
to do. Lo and behold, manager shows up,
sits us both down and is just like Aaron and if you report
this, I gotta take it to HRI. Can't do anything about it.
(06:05):
You know, we're a big company. I'm I'm just going to report it
to HRHR is not going to care about either side.
They're just going to fire you both.
So is that what you want to see happen?
Do you want to see, you know, Mike get fired?
Let's call him Mike. And I was just like, of course,
of course not. This is stupid that you like.
It was a complete accident. We were joking around.
I didn't do it on purpose. He punched me in the nuts back.
(06:26):
I kind of feel like he kind of got the better end of the deal
here. Like, let's just move on.
And Mike goes to her question because she says to says to
Mike, Mike, do you want to see Aaron get fired?
You know, and you're going to get fired, too.
Do you want that? Mike goes, yeah, yeah, I want
that. I want to see Aaron get fired.
He hit me in the head with a metal door.
(06:48):
And that was his exact words. Lo and behold, a week or two
later, I ended up getting fired.Big surprise.
I remember I was in the truck with my dad, and he drove me
there. For whatever reason.
I had my own car, but he drove me there.
And I remember the conversation sitting in the passenger seat,
and he looked over to me and he said, you know, maybe, maybe you
(07:10):
can have a job with us. Maybe you can just come over
because I kind of knew I was going to get fired.
And I was like, yeah, maybe, youknow, not really thinking too
much of it, but thinking like, well, you know, I need I need
something to do. And that was the next day was my
first day as a home inspector. And I became one of the youngest
home inspectors in the state of Florida.
I did that for two years. And now we're here in digital
(07:32):
marketing world because my parents hired a digital
marketing agency at that time. That really sucked.
I always loved marketing, especially in college, that side
of the business, it was just always a challenge.
As you know, Danny, things changed so much, especially in
SEO. Yeah, things are constantly
changing. So I really enjoyed that.
And a lot of marketing agencies at the time and even to this day
(07:54):
have really poor communication, don't show the exact return on
investment and overall just costway too much money for no
results that they're producing. And that's exactly the situation
my parents found themselves in. They spent a ton of money for a
website that was subpar, paid for a bunch of SEO.
That Danny, I'm sure you're all too familiar with these stories
where they pay a bunch of money for SEO with 0 communication.
(08:17):
Maybe they're using a ton of different strategies that don't
actually work or outdated. And my dad and I ended up after
like a year sitting down together to work on the website
together, do SEO together. And that's kind of where I got
my start is, is working in in their particular business as a
home inspector and ended up doing it for their pest control
company. But I had so much fun with it
(08:40):
and so much passion that I helped other companies in the
state of Florida with their own digital marketing with their own
website and ended up getting a marketing and sales manager job
for another company. And that was at a young age.
I want to say I was like 22 at the time.
So now is managing some people and I was doing it for a multi
(09:00):
$1,000,000 business, home service business.
And I had a lot of fun with thattoo.
But at the time as well, I was still helping a ton of people on
the side and I had Wolfpack advising on the side.
That's what we've been around for six years.
But I've only taken it seriouslyfor the last three because all
throughout then I was just doingit as a side hustle.
And at some point it just turnedwith me that, hey, maybe I can,
(09:22):
I can turn this into a full timegig and, and just 100% do that.
So here we are. I mean, the last last few years
we've just been absolutely crushing it, I guess.
And that that's the story, that's the mission.
That's why we do it. I understand the the, the pain
that a lot of these home servicebased businesses go through pest
control companies especially too, and a lot of the false
(09:43):
promises and bad communication and high costs that they see
with digital marketing. So we try to make sure that it's
very, we communicate a lot and all the details are kind of
outlined to see the exact returnon investment from it.
I probably went a little bit toomuch in detail, but hopefully
that's my story, Danny. No, no, you're good.
I love it and I love that story.I've I've listened to several
podcasts that you've been on andI've I've heard that several
(10:05):
Times Now. It's so funny that basically if
you didn't get punched in the balls, maybe you wouldn't have
started this agency today. That's, that's really crazy to
think about. That's really, that's even more
impressive that you've only beengoing hard in the agency for the
past three years or so, given that you guys have all these
reviews and clients and all thatstuff.
It's really impressive. So I'd like, like I've already
told you, really hats off to you.
(10:27):
You're doing a great job. Thank you so much.
You as well, man. Of course I'm impressed.
I appreciate it. Yeah.
OK, so let's let's jump into thewebsite stuff.
So I, I want to cover everythingwebsite related or at least as
as much time as we have. So First off, I, I want to skip
very general. And also I like talking about
website stuff with you here because I know that's kind of
where you started out. I know that you were working for
(10:48):
your dad's company and being an inspector, but one of the first
things that you're doing for your dad and for your original
clients was website design and website building and such.
So I feel like it's very relevant to you and me actually,
because that's, it's pretty similar to my origin story.
So First off, I'd like you to explain why are websites so
important. Most people know they need a
(11:09):
website, but what is actually the utility of a website?
Why do you need one? Why do you need a good one?
Yeah, I get this question quite a bit and a lot of people don't
understand. And the way that I kind of
explain it to a lot of our clients or even just anybody in
general that's kind of interested is think of your
personal home and you invite guests over to your personal
home. You want to make sure that it's
(11:29):
clean, it's neat, it's organized, it's a representation
of you and your family. So your website is the same
deal. I know it's a little bit
dramatic, but when people are visiting your website, that's a
place for people to visit like who you are, who your company
is. So it needs to be clean, neat,
organized and look well. And it needs to show the core
values that you as a business exhibit, even if it's just
(11:52):
yourself right now and needs to show that.
So when you kind of explain it in that kind of way, it's not
necessarily like it's a, you know, you could, you could frame
it as a retail front, but if youreally think about it, it's
honestly just a digital retail front.
It's a place for people to come and kind of visit and get a feel
and a vibe for who you are and obviously a place for them to
convert. So implementing some conversion
(12:14):
rate optimization in there is important.
Awesome, I love that analogy. And it's so interesting because
one of my friends actually runs his dad's construction company
and he's talking to me all abouthouses and OK, well, we look at,
you know, he drives around and always is looking at like, OK,
these houses need to be rebuilt.And oh, well, this one doesn't
have this and that, or it needs a certain amount of rooms or we
(12:34):
need this amount of garages. I'm like, Dang, that's kind of
the same thing as websites of like, I see a just the way is he
can look at bad houses in the neighborhood and say that one
needs to be rebuilt the same wayI can look at websites and be
like, that one needs to be rebuilt.
That's it's such a crazy analogy, but I I totally see the
overlap there. Oh yeah, 100%.
And I'm sure pest control company guys go out to, and I'm
(12:56):
starting to do it too. I'm really bad.
You go out to a restaurant and you see all the rat traps laying
around or how they're being utilized or if they're being
serviced. I've seen those humor posts all
the time. So it's the same thing that like
in home inspections, we see by driving around homes or you're
looking at your personal house and you're just like, damn it, I
really need to fix that. Yeah.
So I I totally relate to you in that. 100% Now tell me, and
(13:20):
actually this is funny, I was going to relate this to a series
that you just started, which I forget what it's called, but
something of like you roasting people's websites.
So you're now doing a series on it.
I'm sure you've seen hundreds ofdifferent websites, everything
that goes wrong. What are some of the most common
mistakes that pest control owners and maybe other home
services make on their websites?Common mistakes.
(13:45):
You know, I think some of my favorite, most common mistakes
that I see is a lot of people, and there's nothing, I guess
inherently wrong with this that we're getting started, right?
But a lot of people go with something like a Wix or a
Squarespace site and they build it themselves with no kind of
perception in terms of if it's good or not or what they need to
be doing. So there's a ton of websites out
(14:07):
there that just overall could use a big kind of cleanup and
overhaul to structure it in the right way.
Things like if you were to imagine you pull it up a website
on your phone, even an easy callto action or call button or
schedule button, book button, whatever it is in the top right
next to the menu, something that's easily clickable.
Or when you're thinking about just the headline and people
(14:29):
scrolling. A lot of times what happens, and
even Google talks about this too, is above the fold content,
ensuring before people can scroll, they can get a very
clear idea of who you are, what you do, where you're located.
And then they can see like either some trust badges like
Google reviews or like a Google guarantee badge and then a book
or a contact button. So when I'm roasting these
websites in this series, it juststarted, I'm having tons of fun
(14:53):
because people are voluntarily commenting their website and I
kind of get to just take my anger out and lay into their
website a little bit. That's hilarious.
I'm enjoying that. And that I would say by far,
it's the home page that is supercritical that a lot of people
just mess up because they do it themselves.
(15:14):
They kind of don't understand ifanything, if you're just getting
a website, like put something upobviously, but a web's design
cost isn't as much as you might expect.
Just hire somebody to do like a nice couple pages for you, pay
like whatever it is to do. And that way you know what, it's
clean, professional and neat. And three to five years later,
when you're ready for the next step, you could pay for that.
(15:35):
Yeah, awesome. I agree.
So you mentioned the the homepage is super important.
Tell me more about that. What do you need on your
homepage? What should that look like?
Yeah. So as I mentioned the first top,
a lot of people, what they call is a hero section of that.
So big, nice big background image, maybe they add a video,
don't add video on mobile devices, keep it to static
images, don't do any type of animations on mobile devices
(15:58):
because we're all optimizing forspeed.
But when we're thinking about web design, we're thinking
mobile first. Over 50% of the traffic nowadays
is on mobile devices and that's what even Google is optimizing
for. So when I'm talking about
everything, I'm talking about itin relevance to a mobile device.
So the first thing, the first title or that headline, that H1
tag, heading 1 tag, we can call it needs to have not necessarily
(16:19):
your brand name. It can have like a nice slogan
to you, but it's very critical that you make it super relevant
towards your service and whatever service area.
So pest control in city as an example, then you can add a nice
little subheading after that. And that's where after that you
add your call to action and all your USPS or unique, unique
(16:42):
value propositions, you Uvps, whatever you want to call it,
add those items on, usually on the far right hand side, you can
add it like a nice background image or whatever else.
As you scroll, add more unique value.
Add your services and links to all your service pages.
With pest control, you have a lot of services, so you need to
make sure that you're linking all of your service pages from
(17:04):
the home page. So a lot of people do like
little blocks, icon blocks or blocks with different images and
different columns that links to all their different services.
Because you're not just do pest control, you might do rodent
exclusion, you might do termite treatments, you might do termini
inspection, termite inspections.And obviously, Danny, as you
know, the more pages that you have that are optimized for a
particular service, the better optimization that you're going
(17:25):
to get. After you Scroll down a little
bit further, that's where a lot of times you're seeing the links
to your blogs, so your content or reading more about us at the
footer. Generally, we want one last call
to action before we actually getto the footer content of, of the
website, which is where you're doing things like your resources
or your contact stuff. But the most critical thing that
(17:46):
I see a lot of is we don't have a call to action on the bottom
and on the top right. We need some type of sticky
header that shows, hey, they cancall, they can book immediately,
whatever it is to always make iteasy.
One of the cool tricks that I like to, to implement too, is
making sure that every call to action is the same color.
So that way it's consistent across and you have nice
contrasting colors. These are things that we talk
(18:08):
about in terms of ADA compliance.
So American with Disabilities Act making sure that even people
who are colorblind and see all the different call to actions.
Love that. OK, So a big part of it is
optimizing for conversions. You want to make sure that
people that are landing on the page, it's as easy as possible
for them to become a customer aspossible.
(18:29):
Absolutely. There are cases where some some
companies can go super heavy on the design and I think there's a
balance between the two where you can go super heavy on the
design and make it super unique and creative and awesome.
But I would lean in terms of a pest control company, I would
learn more towards the side of keeping it super functional and
(18:49):
focus on the conversion rate optimization.
If you're leaning heavily in towards digital marketing
because you want people to land on the site, you want it to be
super fast, and you want them toconvert into the lead.
Awesome, love it. And then what about the other
pages on the site? So just for maybe some more
context so people aren't familiar, I don't like a lot of
people. A lot of pest control owners
will tell me like, hey, rank me #1 on Google.
(19:10):
But I'm like, well, you know, there's a little bit more nuance
of like, is it your website is your Google business profile?
What keywords, what pages? So the first thing to understand
here is that your website is a collection of pages.
It's not just one page. It's not just your homepage is
not just the only page. Your website is a collection of
many different pages. So relating to the question I
(19:31):
was going to ask you, what otherpages do you need on your pest
control site? Do you need a pest library?
Do you need service pages? Like what?
What are the core ones that you definitely need?
Yeah. The core ones that you're going
to need, obviously you're going to need your homepage, you're
going to need some type of schedule page or contact page.
I typically like to have a difference between the schedule
(19:52):
versus contact. So contact is a simple contact
form to contact the office, right?
Or an admin side where the the schedule page is usually where
you have your online scheduler like a field routes connection
or anything like that to where people could just book now or it
submits in a specific format that you want where it's related
to the service. In the job, the property address
and has those fields and attributes there.
(20:14):
So you're going to need your homepage.
I like to have a contact and a schedule page.
The other two things that I feellike you can just use templates
for are terms of use and privacypolicies.
There's a really simple to add as terms of use and a privacy
policy to your website. They aren't necessarily required
if you're just going to get started, but it's a good thing
to add, adds a little bit of professionalism to your site.
After that, that's where you start getting to the fun pages.
(20:36):
So you're also going to need an about page.
About page is really good to kind of expand more on about
your particular company and givea little bit more detail that
you're not able to completely offer on the home page.
So you can add things like your team pictures so people can
understand who are the technicians that are coming out
to service my home or what are some of the what is this company
particularly about? Why are you a differentiator in
(20:56):
my given market then you broughtup a good point in terms of
service areas. I like having a service area
page, especially if you service like a large metro because now
you start talking into SEO worldwhere you can optimize for
certain locations. So service area page super
critical. And I'm going in this order is
kind of an order of importance as you continue to grow because
(21:18):
as you add more pages, obviouslyit's more work for a designer
and the higher the cost. So keep that in mind, service
area page super critical and then you start talking about
these services pages. So as you mentioned, Danny, this
is a collection of pages. And as we build more pages,
we're getting further optimization for Google.
We're giving more detail for theconsumer when they're leading or
(21:42):
landing on the page and they're able to relate to more of the
language that they see there rather than maybe they land on
your website and they just see pest control services, but
they're specifically looking forsomething about spiders and that
you guys service spiders or rodents.
So if you're able to do that andexpand on that, then you can
expand on your services by having a little drop down to
(22:03):
have information, maybe that youdo general pest control, right?
But maybe you also do termite inspections, termite treatments,
maybe you offer multiple different types of termite
treatments that they could read about on your website as well.
As you get more detailed, you can continue on, maybe talk
about bees, maybe talking about spiders, maybe talking about
rodent exclusion, the list goes on.
And then finally, obviously you could talk about a pest library
(22:26):
too, which I know is pretty popular in the in the pest
control world, having a pest library.
My personal belief on the pest library is it's one of those
extra things, but it's not necessarily one of those things
that I would say is hyper critical because most people are
searching when they have a problem and you can lead a lot,
leave a lot of that information and stuff for your blog.
(22:46):
So that blog is where we can adda lot of the content and related
items to your local market, suchas Scorpions in Arizona.
Yeah, awesome. Yeah, No, I've, I've definitely
seen some overlap with that myself of the past library in
the blog. It's like, you know, if we're
already talking about spiders inArizona, I mean, is that a past
page or is that a blog page? We can kind of do both.
So I'm in complete agreement with you there.
(23:07):
So yeah, then talk to me more about the blogs.
What should we be blogging about?
Should it only be top of funnel stuff or what should the content
be there? Yeah, great question.
And the thing kind of when you're talking about from an SEO
world, when we're targeting particular content or running
particular content, we're looking for two things.
We're looking for good volume. So we know that people are
(23:29):
searching for it. And two, it's not super
difficult. So if you're searching for
something online and let's say familyhandyman.com is ranking
for it, which is a very well known site, right?
You're probably going to have a difficult time ranking next to
familyhandyman.com. So keep those things in mind.
And it's better to be hyper local.
(23:50):
So if you keep things relevant towards Phoenix or Orlando, FL
or Tampa, FL, wherever you're located, that's obviously very,
very important because those people are looking for, hey, I
have a mosquito problem in Tampa.
How do I solve that mosquito problem?
Well, maybe you can write an article about, Hey, here are top
five tips to solve your mosquitoproblem in sample Florida as a
particular blog post. But obviously you can hire an
(24:12):
SEO and usually those Seos can use like content.
But if you're doing it on your own, my general tips are
thinking hyperlocal and as well as what are people searching for
and what answers can you give them in that particular blog
post. Yeah, awesome.
Love that. And I'll pivot here a little
bit. You mentioned this, or at least
you're talking about this a little bit of like people will
(24:34):
build on Squarespace or Wix. What is your favorite website
builder? I love WordPress.
Yeah. Me too.
You love WordPress too? Yeah, WordPress is ultimately my
particular favorite. It's an open source platform, so
it's essentially like Wix or Squarespace or even if, what's
the other one? Shopify.
You know, a lot of people get sucked into Shopify.
(24:54):
Those are good too, but it's their ecosystem.
They control that ecosystem. WordPress is almost like any web
designer or SEO in there can do like work on the engine.
And so it takes a little bit more expertise, but it has a lot
more functionality in terms of what you can do with it compared
to any of these others. It's some limited stuff, you
(25:14):
know, you're stuck with what youhave and you kind of need like
in some cases somebody from Squarespace to say like, hey,
we're going to add this feature so you can actually be able to
do this where WordPress, anybodycan go in and add a plug into
something. So that way you can make
whatever happened and you can obviously edit the code at any
given time. Awesome.
Yeah, we love WordPress as well.I think about 50% of the
(25:37):
Internet is built on WordPress. Obviously that gives it some
credibility. Most of the home service
companies and pest control companies that I'm working with
are already using it. So that just makes it more
convenient. But yeah, love it for all the
different plug insurance, all the different variability.
But like you said, it does, it is a little bit more advanced of
like, you know, there's, there'ssome super simple ones if you've
seen something like card or maybe even Wix or Squarespace.
(25:58):
I don't use those too much. But yeah, my favorite is
definitely WordPress as well. So going off of that, what are
some top plug insurance that youshould be using on WordPress,
assuming you're using it? Let's see.
Besides, so we're not going to be talking about like designer
builder, plug insurance, whatever plug insurance, OK,
(26:20):
none of my favorite. What's that?
I said not themes, so yeah, yeah.
OK. Any plug insurance that you
would like? Some of my favorite plug
insurance that we use on almost every site, one of them is WP
Forms. So WordPress Forms, by far one
of my favorites in order to automatically capture all of
your leads that you're gonna be receiving if you work with Danny
(26:41):
or Aaron, of course. And then after that, the next
step one after that is WPSMTP. That is a good extension to WP
Forms to essentially ensure yourleads are getting delivered to
your e-mail inbox properly. So that's a an extra
configuration that might take a little bit more of an advanced
step, but it's a good way to ensure that you're getting every
(27:02):
single lead delivered to your inbox that comes in through WP
Forms. There's a couple other ones that
I would recommend such as WP Rocket is another great one.
WP Rocket is a good optimizer. So a lot of these themes within
WordPress need a little bit of cleanup, need a little bit of
extra help in order to optimize fully for mobile responsiveness,
(27:23):
for example, or even on desktop and optimize the speed of the
website. So WP Rocket, WP Rocket is just
an easy way to do that. Another one that I probably like
a lot is image. If I.
So image if I goes hand in hand with WP Rocket that optimizes a
lot of image files and shows them in this new web format.
(27:47):
So not a PNG or a JPG that people might think of.
It puts it in a different formatthat is actually more condensed
and loads a lot faster, especially on browsers like
Google Chrome that a lot of people utilize.
I had to go on for that. What about SEO?
SEO, that's perfect, perfect. Danny.
(28:09):
OK, so maybe you have a different opinion on this.
So back in the day, I felt like Yost SEO was like the plug in to
use, but I feel like Yost SEO isslagging a little bit.
I've been testing out rank math a little bit.
So in terms of SEO plug insurance, I would go with
either a Yost SEO or a rank math.
I think there's more functionality to rank math and
(28:30):
but I think Yost SEO is good to just kind of set it and forget
it and kind of get some nice redor green lights.
Cuz Yost SEO in terms of its functionality.
You say who you are, you say what a page is optimized for and
it gives you a red or green light based on how well you
optimized it. OK, interesting.
I heard you mention Yost on another podcast.
Yeah, I personally like rank math more.
(28:50):
It is a little bit more expensive and it's a little bit
more, I guess maybe you have to be more of an expert, Yost, like
you said, you can kind of set itand forget it.
So yeah, I definitely like rank math more so.
OK, cool. So that's plug insurance.
Now what about tracking? I know you're huge on tracking.
What do we need to be doing in order to track the success of
(29:11):
our website? Do we need Google Analytics,
Search Console, Semrush? Like what are all the components
we need to track the website? Yeah, it's ultimately gonna be
like whatever obviously is gonnabe most easy for you.
I know a lot of companies use Google Analytics.
You know, Google Analytics to meis like good for like just base
tracking. Same thing with Google Search
(29:33):
Console, good for just the basics.
I definitely recommend setting up both.
Regardless, it's obviously very important to set up Google
Search Console from an SEO perspective.
But in terms of tracking, I would definitely set up a Google
Analytics just to understand thegeneral metrics of people
landing on your site, how you'retrending, your bounce rate, if
people are leaving very quickly on your site.
And I would set up Google SearchConsole just as a matter of
(29:54):
necessity in order to make sure Google is indexing your site
properly. Outside of that, in terms of
other systems that I like, I do like systems like what converts
or call rail. Those are really 2 great systems
in order to automatically dynamically put different call
tracking numbers on your websiteand track all your forms.
The reason for those two specifically is so that way if
(30:17):
somebody comes from Facebook, ifsomebody comes from Instagram,
if somebody comes from Google, if somebody comes from Bing or a
random e-mail, you can actually attribute that given lead to
where that source was. So for Wolfpack, if we're
running all different types of advertising for a bunch of
different clients or we're doingsocial media for some a bunch of
clients, we can aggregate all the lead data and then
(30:38):
understand exactly what the return on investment is through
a particular channel. So if we ran Google Ads, we know
hey, you made a 5X Roy on your Google ad campaign in the last
three months. Love that.
Yeah, we're obviously big proponents of tracking as well.
I think it's just a non negotiable, especially as you
get into more platforms. If you're doing website SEO and
(30:59):
then Google Business Profile andthen Yelp and then social media
and then Facebook ads, it's likeby the time we're doing all
these different platforms and we're getting all these
different leads, how do we know which one is working?
So I'm I'm totally with you there.
We we have to be make, we have to make sure that we're tracking
all the different platforms. We have to know, Hey, you know,
if we're spending, you know, 5 KA month on Facebook ads and
(31:20):
they're you're barely making anymoney, but we're spending it's
time with local service ads and they're crushing it, then crank
it up on local service ads and do less on Facebook ads.
So 100% agree there. Something else I wanted to
cover, which maybe we even spendthe the bulk of the rest of the
show on, is what is the future of websites and search and SEO?
(31:40):
Where do you see things going? You know, I was just talking
about this, I think yesterday I was on another podcast and I was
just talking about this. So it's a little bit older news
right now just because we're nowwe're talking about at the end
of May. But Danny, I don't know if you
knew and there was a story posted.
So I keep up on all the news with perplexity.
(32:01):
Perplexity, the application. And there was a story on
Perplexity about how Apple, for the first time ever, reported
that Google searches through Safari declined.
Yeah. It's a massive thing to say.
And I think it was really underrated and undersold as a
story because somebody from Apple is specifically stating
(32:21):
for the first time ever, Google searches went down.
And Google obviously is not going to report to us all the
time what their their Google search history is.
And I guarantee you, I guaranteeyou more people are going to
Google. And if you look at any
particular SEO tracking software, they're 100% leaning
into, hey, you can track your positions on Google Now, but you
(32:42):
could track how you're ranking on ChatGPT or how you're ranking
on Perplexity or how you're ranking on Grok.
And I know for my personal self,I'm not Googling informational
stuff anymore. I have ChatGPT, right?
I had the dock on my phone rightat the bottom.
And I'm talking to Chad JPT all day long.
Like it's my personal therapist,which is probably concerning
from a data standpoint because it knows everything about me.
(33:06):
And but I'll tell you my mental health, Danny has never been
better since I've, I've, it's been my personal assistant.
Really. We'll talk about everything.
Yeah, Yeah. But my personal health has never
been better. So in terms of the future,
websites are always going to be important regardless.
I don't care what any anyone particularly says, especially
(33:27):
with these AAI models, because they're still scraping all of
the data from your website. And even another study that was
published talked about how for every six visits or every, I'm
sorry, every visit that they gave your website, Google will
crawl 6 pages on average comparatively, chat DBT or even
(33:47):
what's the other Danny, help me out here, This other AI 1
Claude, Claude AI for every visit that they give you, on
average, they are indexing thousands of pages.
Wow. So your website regardless is
always going to be important. And the content that you put on
your website is always going to be important because that's what
this AI uses in order to continue training its models.
(34:10):
And things are going to change with pest control, with home
inspections, with digital marketing.
And AI needs that information tounderstand what's changing.
So don't think, hey, just because of this AOL world, I'm
going to stop my content, I'm going to stop my SEO.
I'm going to stop my web design because it's not going to matter
anymore. It's still going to matter.
It's just how the clients are going to find you or get to that
(34:31):
has changed a little bit. There's a wonderful graphic that
I saw on Twitter that basically showed, hey, if you now Google
anything that is like general informative stuff like how do I
get rid of ants, right? I had a blog post that was
ranking number one for for a year on how to get rid of ants.
And that particular blog post had an AI overview section now.
(34:54):
So that blog post I had got pushed down and in the AI
overview section, they just haveall these footnotes and sources
to go to that website where we wrote the article for.
I would imagine at some point interms of advertising to like
Google will find a way to put advertisements in these AI
responses as well. But what's really concerning to
me is just I really do believe in Danny.
(35:15):
I don't know where you stand on this.
I think this is the largest shake up ever for for Google and
Google search and for digital marketing.
It's more important than ever tomake sure if you're spending a
lot of money on digital marketing or you're interested
in getting getting into it to work with somebody that is
staying top of mind with what's going on with the taint changes
in digital marketing, they have to be start to start thinking
(35:36):
about how traffic is being brought into you with ChatGPT
and even tracking that. So using a system like call very
low, what converts it can track the leads that you're getting
from ChatGPT. I think there was one month with
Wolfpack. We received three leads from
ChatGPT. We tracked, which was really
quite interesting. I was like, I wonder how that
happened, but quite interesting.Awesome.
(35:57):
Yeah, no, I 100% agree with everything you just said.
One of the main points there is that websites still will matter,
and I was gonna mention that. I'm glad you mentioned this.
These large language models likechats BT are pulling from the
web. So it's not like just all
websites disappear and like there's the, the web just ceases
to exist. Like, no, they're just pulling
from the web. So it's still maybe now more
(36:19):
important than ever to have a website.
But you talked about the, so yousaid the the website's still
important, but it's changing andlike, you know, ranking and
showing up, everything is changing.
How do we adapt to that then? Like what should we be doing now
and in the future? Is there, should we be differing
the content that we make? Should we be structuring the
(36:40):
site another way? What are your thoughts on this?
Yeah, it's a great point, very valid point.
And I don't think anybody right now has all the answers.
I think a lot of people in the SEO world are kind of, and even
the web design world are kind ofall scratching their heads or
coming up with theories on how they should be going about
their, their lives and their daily work.
And I'll say right now what's really, really important is just
(37:02):
making sure you're setting up some type of tracking to see how
it's changing in the results. So make sure you have Google
Analytics set up and then you can use, you mentioned it
earlier, you can use a SEM rush or another tool to essentially
track all the business you're getting from these AI models.
Such as I mentioned earlier, Wolfpack was able to get 3 leads
from ChatGPT. Outside of that, I would keep
(37:24):
the majority of it status quo with everything that you do,
keep it focused on the end consumer and the person at the
end of the day. So a lot of the early SEO
optimization stuff was really geared towards the algorithm,
but a lot of shift has happened to where it's all focused on the
consumer. I would continue focusing on the
consumer rather than trying to play into some particular
(37:46):
algorithm because that's ultimately what everybody is
trying to go to anyway. Google Results, Chatbt, Cloud,
AI, Perplexity, they're all trying best to serve the
consumer as quickly as possible.So your website and your content
needs to pull the same way, and then how you're tracking that
needs to change. Definitely, Yeah, No, it's super
(38:06):
interesting. And like you said, I like that
you've taken a humble approach to this, that everyone or at
least a good amount of people like to think that they know
exactly what's going to happen, but we really don't.
This is like completely changed the space.
Like are there going to be little Google ad snippets in the
AI overviews? Are there going to be more AI
overviews? Are they going to remove them?
Is Google business profile stillgoing to be relevant?
(38:28):
Is that going to look different?So I agree.
I mean, there's we can't necessarily say that there's one
thing to do or do this on your website.
I'm more for what I've been advocating more recently is more
bottom of funnel content and brand stuff.
But overall there's still there's not like one
prescription here, which is pretty tough.
(38:49):
But like you said a little bit earlier that you need to have
someone who's digital marketing savvy on your team, on your
side, whether that's like a consultant, whether that's even
like your son or daughter, or maybe an agency like ours, that
you just have someone that's on your team that is very
adaptable, that is staying up todate with what's going on.
(39:11):
Because things are changing so fast that maybe websites won't
be so important at some point. Or maybe it's all social media
now, everything that's changing so quick.
I think you need someone on yourteam that knows what's going on.
Absolutely. At the end of the day, a lot of
people, it might be panicking orstressing out about something,
(39:31):
but all these algorithms and what they're trying to do is
just serve the consumer. So just reiterating kind of what
I was saying earlier is if you go in with that particular
mindset and play into that, you're going to be doing fine no
matter what. A good example of this is
thinking about Google Local service ads.
With Google Local service ads, what does the consumer see and
what do they care about? Well, they care about the
(39:52):
reputation and the reviews that show up, right?
And that you're verified for thejob.
They care about the photos that they see.
So you need good reviews, you need good photos, you need a
good reputation, and then ultimately they care about the
relationship that they build with you over the phone and what
the end price is and see if that's value for them.
The same thing applies across the fold for everything else.
(40:13):
And if you're super stressed outor even stressed about cash
right now, as Danny, you mentioned earlier, focusing on
the bottom of the funnel stuff, it will be an easy way to know
that you're getting the return on investment rather than the
top of the funnel. But if you have extra money to
spend, top of funnel is still very important to increase your
reach, increase your impressions.
Because there's studies obviously that show if you see
something 7 times or whatever, you're more likely to buy than
(40:35):
somebody that obviously is showing just for the first time.
And it goes for like any particular business, no matter
who you are. Awesome.
And maybe to close this out, I have one question after this.
But for those bottom of funnel pages that we're talking about
of maybe that might be like a pest control Chicago page or
even it's more general, but still it ranks on some of those
(40:56):
bottom of funnel keywords that might be called like money
keywords to money pages that aregoing to generate you revenue
assuming someone clicks on it and converts on that page.
How can we optimize those pages for conversions?
What should be on those? Yeah.
So repeat your question again. Specifically, are we talking
about the service pages? The bottom of funnel pages,
which might be like a pest control Chicago page.
(41:19):
OK. So and we're optimizing for SEO,
correct? We're optimizing.
I'm talking about conversions, so someone is already on the
page. How do we make sure that they
convert and become a customer? Yeah.
So going back to what I was saying earlier with the
homepage, a lot of the same rules apply here.
But even if we were talking about let's just say for
advertising to the same kind of information applies.
(41:40):
So top right, we need that clearcall to action button that's
going to be the same color, verycontrasting.
So if we have a white background, think red, green,
blue button and all those call to action colors going to match
throughout each section. You can imagine like just the
the first section, that hero section is going to be 1 block.
With each block, we're going to aim to have a call to action on
that, and we're going to have a main headline subheading.
(42:03):
Those trust badges are super important, and whatever call to
action that you want right belowthat.
For advertising and for some service pages, you may also want
a form on that page. I know there's a lot of web
designs out there that have a form on every single page.
It's kind of a preference thing.If you want a form on every
single page, it's a good way forpeople to just automatically
enter their information rather than giving them extra work to
(42:27):
do to click a page and then submit their information.
It's kind of up to you because Ifeel in some aspects that it can
clutter the website versus they can enjoy the aesthetic a little
bit more but have to put in a little bit more work.
So the goal here is to lessen the workload for the consumer so
they can just easily see what's the trade off.
And here's my information as youScroll down on that page, all
(42:48):
the same stuff applies. Applying a bunch of information,
frequently asked questions at the bottom.
Finally, we cannot forget our final bottom call to action.
Same color, nice contrasting colors on the background
compared to the call to action button.
Sometimes when we build these landing pages too, when we're
advertising for just a particular service, we'll take
(43:09):
out the header in the footer andwe'll build our own header and
furters and remove all links to essentially make it.
We don't want you to click anywhere else but the call to
action or about submitting the lead form.
But in terms of a regular page on your website, that's not
something you want to do becauseyou want to make sure that
everybody can find the information that they want.
Interesting. OK, OK.
So yeah, essentially all the same rules apply from your home
(43:30):
page. And I generally agree with that
because overall you want to optimize all of these pages for
conversion. So love that.
Last thing I want to ask you before you we wrap up is in
general, overall, what advice would you like to give to pest
control owners? Maybe there's something really
big that they're lacking. Maybe this is just something
that you're super passionate about.
(43:51):
What advice would you give to the Just General Pest control
owner listening to the show? Yeah, I would say the most that
I see out of a lot of pest control company and business
owners is a lot of times you getsucked into the day-to-day and
you might forget about your SEO strategy, your website, your
advertising or whatever it is. But you need to set the time
(44:12):
daily to or not daily, every week or so to look at those
metrics and understand them and communicate to whoever is doing
your marketing. I don't care if it's you.
I don't care if it's like you mentioned, like a son or a
daughter. I don't care if it's an agency
like or it's Danny or it's a consultant, whoever need to set
the time to do that. Because quite frankly, what
(44:32):
happens I think all too often isthey're working with marketing
with they hire somebody and their expectations maybe at the
beginning are unrealistic. Or they have good initial goals
that they meet and they say great, but then it goes by the
wayside and they stop tracking things.
And then three months later they're like, this is, this is
really bad. And then they quit on it and
they quit on the goal. We can't quit on the goal.
(44:54):
That's where we need to go foot on the gas and say what are the
metrics telling us? Because the metrics don't lie.
They tell you exactly what is wrong.
For example, if we're running any particular kind of campaign,
we might say, OK, how many clicks are we getting?
What's the impressions? Is the click through rate good?
Is it not? Is the conversion rate good or
(45:15):
is it not? And each step we know what is
either broken or still working. And a lot of times what happens
is with any particular thing youmight notice, hey, we're
actually getting all these callsand they're actually good leads.
But I have an issue with my office that I wasn't even paying
attention to or my call center that I wasn't even paying
attention to. Or hey, I found out like this
(45:36):
has happened so many times. I don't know about you, Danny,
but we find out that all the leads that are being sent to
this particular company are actually just going to this
person's this person's phone andit's being directed to spam
because at T and T-Mobile. They're so much.
Spam nowadays and so it's actually they have hidden stuff
on the back end and they're actually missing a ton of calls.
(45:56):
So they're upset and they come to us and they say I'm not
getting any leads. You guys are reporting these
leads, but I'm not getting anything to check your phones.
But I go without saying, going back to the beginning, make sure
you're tracking these analytics and either meet, meeting, or
speaking with somebody at least once a month.
If you can look at it on your own every single week and you're
staying on top of it because these trends change and your
(46:19):
strategy and everything has to change with it.
Three months from now, if you look back into it, of course
it's not going to be doing well because you should have been
changing for the last three months and shifting the strategy
a little bit, whether it's shifting budget, changing your
focus or whatever else it is. Amen.
I think it's been a great podcast.
Well, I think we'll wrap it up here.
So Aaron, where can people learnmore about you and the services
(46:40):
that you provide? Yeah, people can obviously go to
wolfpackadvising.com for all theinformation, but honestly, just
add me on social media. I love connecting with people on
social media. A lot of people have been
sending me messages lately. Happy to help.
So shoot me a message and we'll stay in touch there.
You can check out all my links on social media.
Awesome, what's social platforms?
And I'll link all those below. It's everything, man.
(47:01):
It's everything. If you want to see the funny
dance moves, well, bad dance moves, it's TikTok.
If you want to see the professional side of me, it's
Facebook. I don't ever go on LinkedIn
though. Ah Dang dude, you got to get on
LinkedIn, That's where I'm at. No, no, I hate LinkedIn.
It's just there's so many peopletrying to sell me something and
like, to be quite frank, I like going on social media and I
(47:22):
like, I like, I like TikTok. You know, you could Just Dance
and kind of have fun and just have a natural conversation.
I don't know about you, but LinkedIn has maybe we chat a
little bit more about that. But for LinkedIn, for me, it's
always just been a tons of spam,tons of sales and I don't get
real connection out of that. I don't know.
Oh, it's totally spammy and artificial, But you know, I
(47:43):
still like it. I still like playing the
LinkedIn game. It's fun.
But that's that's an interestingtake.
OK, so everyone go follow him onFacebook and I'll I'll link the
the rest of those below. So yeah, it's been great having
you on the show here and it's been a blast.
It's been great meeting you and I hope to do it again.
Thank you, Danny. Yeah.
Yeah, for sure.