Get More Phone Calls In 2024 With Free Traffic Tactics - Part 2 - Episode 49

Restoration Marketing Secrets Podcast

In 2024, the most important thing that's going to help you grow your business is more phone calls for services that you provide in your specific service area. So let's talk about ways you can do that with free traffic in 2024, including your website and Google maps and multiple other strategies.

This isn't just any podcast. This is your secret weapon for dominating the market. This is the Restoration Marketing Secrets Podcast. And this is your host, Sean McMeen.

Welcome to Restoration Marketing Secrets Podcast. I am your host, Sean McMeen, and this is episode number 49, almost at 50. Almost at 50 getting really close excited today to be sharing with you ways that you can get more phone calls for your damage restoration and home services business. And today we're going to specifically be talking about ways you can do this with free traffic, what I call free traffic tech techniques or tactics in order to get your phone to ring.

Today's episode is not all about just website marketing and Google ads and Google maps and things like that. I know at the end of the day, the most important aspect that's going to help you grow your business is by getting the phone to ring. And that's what I'm going to focus on is tactics that will get your phone to ring and get people to call you for services that you provide in your specific service area.

So, without any delay here, let's go ahead and get in it. Today is a Saturday, January 6th, and um, I'm out here looking at the snow outside of my window here. I, I live in St. Louis, so this is our first snowfall. Kids are outside playing in the snow, sledding down the hill, but I needed to pop in here and do this recording because I want to share this information with you, and then I'm going to go sled myself.

So, let's dive into the free traffic in 2024. So the two most important buckets of free traffic in 2024 are your website and your Google Maps. So what do I mean by free traffic? Is it free to have a website? Is it free to have Google Maps? Yes, technically you can throw up a website for very relatively low cost.

Um, and you can start a Google Maps location for relatively low cost time resources. Now, Uh, there's other things that you can look at from a free traffic standpoint. We're going to dive into each one of these, but let me name them off real quick. Obviously starting with the hub of your website of your internet side of things is your website.

The second hub of that is your Google maps and they need to talk to each other. They need to be related. Information needs to link and be related on both of those properties, but there's other free sources of traffic in 2024. YouTube, Bing, Apple Maps, Yelp, and social media is obviously other areas of free traffic and other ways of generating calls to your.

to your business. So let's dive into each one of them. Let's start with the, what I like to call the hub of your online presence, which is your website. Your website needs to be branded towards your business. That is something I see way too often is that people will spend a lot of money wrapping their truck.

Putting a sign out in front of their business. But when somebody goes and searches your business online, it doesn't look like the same business. You need to make sure it's branded towards your business and who you are and not just who you are, but how you help people and have a personal touch with that.

Have a team photo on there, have those sorts of things. Make sure it's mobile friendly. Make sure it loads fast. Make sure it's optimized to generate phone calls by having the phone number Always stay at the top right hand corner of your website as you scroll down that page that phone number needs to always stay on Top and make it easy for someone to contact you.

You need to have the phone number listed multiple times You also need to have a page For every single service that you have, uh, if you do water, mold, fire, sewage cleanup, you do roofing, you do home remodeling, kitchen, bath, you name it. All of those services that you provide, you need to have a specific page and on those pages talk about how you perform the service and think of about it as a problem solution statement.

Everything you want to think of is when people are going online, they're looking. For a solution to a problem. So you have to lead with the problem, follow it up with the solution. Okay. So every page, uh, every service that you have needs to have a page, every location, every suburb, every small town around you in your service area, whether it's a 20 mile service, 20 mile radius service area, or whether it's 60 miles, or You need to eventually have a page for all of those locations on your website and talk about the services that you provide in that town and jobs that you've completed in that town.

So that is all about linking, um, Google to make sure that your, your brand, your company provides a specific service in a specific area. And then here's jobs that we've completed. Okay. We'll talk a little bit more about content in just a little bit here. Um, but those are some tips there for your website.

Make sure the information on your website is helpful to the people looking for a solution. Okay. Sounds like common sense, but I see way too often where somebody will throw up a website homepage. You maybe have a service page, you maybe have a contact us page and you don't build out the rest of this. And I get it.

You need to start at some point. Um, you need to have a starting point. piece of, of, of website. But I'm telling you that if you want to get more phone calls, you have to put these things in place for a long term asset and long term, um, ability to get phone calls so that Google can recommend to you as an expert.

Okay. So that's, uh, number one, your website. On your website, you need to have, we talked about mobile friendly, but we need to have also called the action or trust badges that give the people, um, that visit your website, the ability to know that you are an expert in your field. So put on your IICRC certification.

If you're RIA, BBB, Google five star, any sort of certifications, you need to have those on there so that the way it gives that. You know, that's sort of the Amazon effect. When you go out to Amazon, you're never going to purchase a product that has zero stars, right? So you need to have those trust badges out there along with your reviews that you have, uh, from consumers come from clients or whatnot that are, that are, um, that you've completed work from.

So pull those in from Google maps. Yelp, Facebook, all of those different areas and make sure that, um, those reviews are shown on every single page of your website. Usually a good place to put those is at the footer and then at the top, put that five star rating up there and then give somebody the ability to submit the review on your website.

Okay? So those are all important elements. If you want to find out more about these elements, you can go to restorationmarketing. com slash 2024 and you can find the full webinar I did on 2024 tactics. Let's dive into content. So in order to get some free traffic to your website, you need to be providing helpful content on a recurring basis.

This content needs to be solving solutions for people. Um, not DIYers, but people that are looking for help. Um, and so think about the common reasons why people will call you. And then, um, when you, when you put together those helpful pieces of content, such as, you know, five way, five ways, uh, water damage can affect your in air quality, right?

Or six water cleanup tips for after our local, uh, six cleanup tips after a flood has happened in your home. Um, or. Ways, uh, why, why you would choose a water damage contractor over general contractor, those types of things, you need to be providing solutions to that. The best way to do that is to go out to Google, search for a service that you provide, and then you'll see a section down there called people also ask.

So you need to be answering those questions with your helpful content. You need to also be turning your previous jobs into case studies and before and after images of, um, of the work that you've done. Uh, and so those case studies should be relevant towards specific areas and services that you've, that, that you've done.

And so I would take that and put it into those location pages along with a section on your website saying work we have done or our portfolio or before and after case studies, something along those lines so that you can have. Quality area for people to go to see that you actually do the work that you say you do need.

I talked about before about having service pages and location pages on each one of those. Service pages and location pages. You need to have frequently asked questions. I talked about going out and searching for that service and answering those questions. The frequently asked questions are a good portion, a good section that you can add to your service pages, frequent questions that somebody would ask about that service, and then put that answer there as well.

Google's looking for people to recommend for these solutions. If you provide the answers, they're going to recommend you. Okay. So that's about monthly content. You also need to be doing branded videos for your company. So for every service that you provide, you should have a video embedded on that page that talks about those service.

And on the location pages, you need to have a video talking about the look, the service that you provide in that location. And this is going to further emphasize to Google that, you know, that you're a trusted expert in your field and in a specific area. You can turn before and after case studies into videos.

You can also turn testimonials into, into videos and take videos of your warehouse, take videos of your office, those types of things. So that's an important aspect branded videos. You, you put them on YouTube, put a nice description in there, put your name address phone number and your website in the description.

And then you would take that video and embed it into those pages and then share it across social media as well. Speaking of social media, make sure you're doing weekly posts. So these are posts about jobs that you've completed about your brand, about your services, about your reviews. And those are great ways to get generate free traffic.

Is this going to get your phone ringing overnight? No, but it's going to help promote your brand and give positive, positive social signals back to your brand and back to your website because you're going to be linking back to pages. So just make sure that you, uh, are providing the right resources within those posts to your services, to your case studies and to your website.

So social media is a great aspect of that. Another important aspect, I talked about the second big bucket within the free traffic side of things. Is your Google maps listing. So I just previously talked about your website. So the main two buckets we're going to talk about today were, were the website and the Google maps section.

So I just talked about the website and about brand new content about, um, brand is videos about social media and the other big topic relates to Google maps. So on your Google maps, the most important things that you want to make sure that are filled out on there is that You have a uniform name, address, and phone number, whatever name, address, and phone number you have on your Google maps listing is what you're going to have on your website.

So they both connect. Okay. You want to make sure you're getting reviews for your Google maps profile. Reviews are a huge ranking factor right now in 2024. And it's even going to be more so going into the future. Think about it this way. When we, when we promote everything that we put on our website saying we're doing this service in a specific area, Google needs to know that other people are hearing that and that um, They're using you for that service.

And so once you do that, once you link those two together by getting reviews, just as important as collecting that check, I can't tell you how many times and I'll go off on a tangent here about the reviews. So many amazing restoration companies are doing amazing work, but they're not asking or pushing for that review from that client.

Don't feel like you're being annoying. Ask for help. That's what you're doing is you're asking this person that you just helped to help you. And don't feel like it's, it's, um, you're being annoying or, or whatever. You just help them out. Have them help you out. And the best way to get that review is by asking them, Hey, would you mind help us out by connect?

If you submit a review for us, you're going to help us connect with other people like you that need our services. I know that you're, you're satisfied with what we've done for you. So we'd love to help other people just like you. That's the way you ask for a review. Not by saying, Hey, can you go out and submit a five star review for us?

You know, so ask for help. People like to help other people make it easy for them by sending them a text message with a direct link to submit that review. And if you can't get that review on Google, get it on the out, get it on Facebook, get it on four square. It doesn't matter where you get the review.

All of these reviews are important, but the biggest, the highest quality review is obviously going to be on Google maps. The next thing you need to be making sure you're doing on your Google business profile and your Google maps profile is adding photos, add photos of jobs that you completed, your team, all of those aspects that you have on your website and your videos and things you want to make sure you're putting on Google maps as photos.

Okay? So if you have a team photo, put it on Google maps. If you have a picture of your truck, put it on Google maps. If you went out and did a job and you did a job in Chicago. Put a picture of that job in Chicago in, in, um, in Google maps. Okay. So those are easy things, free things that you can do to promote your services.

It's just providing Google additional feedback about what you're doing and how you're doing it. Um, there's another section within Google business profile, um, that's called posts. And in this section, you want to think about adding all of your services that you provide, all the locations you service, all your case studies and YouTubes.

And I keep repeating these same things over and over because they're all interlinked together. They're all interlinked together. I don't want you to be going out there thinking, Hey, I've got to stop everything I'm doing in post out on Google maps. That's not the point of this. The point of this is. Uh, aspects that you can do to generate this free traffic.

So don't think that this is going to make your phone blow up overnight. All of these things together, longterm created a brandable asset for your business. And if you ever want to sell your business, these are sellable assets that go along just as well as your truck or your, your equipment that you do.

So make sure you're doing those Google posts, have your team do those Google posts. And then there's a new feature in Google maps, uh, Google business profile that allows you to connect all your social channels in there. So if you, if you have an Instagram, if you have Facebook, if you have, um, Twitter or X or Pinterest or those types of things connect those into your Google business profile.

And ultimately what this is going to do, it's going to increase your online visibility in your local area and you're going to outrank your local competitors because you're doing things that they're not. And Google's providing these options for you to do for a reason because they want to see that you're using their properties and then they want to recommend you as an expert if you do these things.

And this is going to ultimately dominate your competition, generate more phone calls. And increase your visibility in additional areas. So that is the end of episode 49. About generating, uh, phone calls with free traffic. These are the things that we are most focused on for our clients in 2024, and it will move the needle.

I promise you it will move the needle. And these are things that, um, that we do on a daily basis. If you want to learn more again, you can go to restorationmarketing. com slash 2024 to watch the full webinar where we dive in more deeply on these topics. But for now, This is the end of episode 49. Cannot wait to do episode 50 about paid traffic that is going to be working in 2024.

So we'll dive into that next until next time.

You've been listening to the Restoration Marketing Secrets Podcast. Sean's not here to just talk the talk. He's walked the walk with a track record of helping over 70 damage restoration companies and engaging in over 500 conversations with industry owners. He's seen it all from digital marketing triumphs to the most ingenious growth hacks.

He's got the keys to the kingdom and he's sharing them. With you, we hope you've enjoyed the show. If you did make sure to like rate and review. We'll be back soon, but in the meantime, for more, hit the website at restoration marketing. com. See you next time on the restoration marketing secrets podcast.