Robert Davis
Are you looking to get more customers for your home service business? Scorpion’s marketing experts, Kirby Oscar, Vice President of Vertical Growth, Ashlie Kim, Senior Vice President of Advertising, and Matt Bently, Chief Data Scientist, provided a webinar for Home Services businesses going over how SEO, digital advertising, and your reputation are pivotal in attracting new business. Let’s dive into the highlights. Or you can watch the full webinar here.
Focus on the Right Customer
The first step in your marketing strategy is focusing on the right customer. Marketing is your time to target your ideal customer. Why is it so important to focus on the right customer? The customer journey begins with your first marketing effort, with your customer’s first impression of you and your brand. It’s important to start the customer journey by focusing on them and, specifically, what they want and what you can offer.
Let’s say you run a plumbing business and want to focus on residential service; don’t advertise that you do commercial work. Your advertising, keywords, website, and marketing efforts should highlight the areas of business where your company shines.
If you target the wrong customer, for example, a customer looking for a commercial plumber, your customer will start the customer journey on the wrong foot. One in four customers are willing to pay up to 10% more in every industry if they feel your company is the best to meet their needs, so take the time to hone your marketing targets to ensure you’re attracting the right customer.
Driving Customers to Your Business
Now that you’ve found the right customer, it’s time to take the next step, SEO. Utilizing SEO to acquire new customers is one of the foundational building blocks to drive customers to your business. Most business owners understand the importance of Google search engine rankings, but fail to recognize the magnitude of opportunity Google offers local businesses. Google gets almost 300 million searches every hour, just through Google alone, nearly double the amount of traffic Yelp gets in one month. A massive pool of customers is waiting to find your business through Google search.
All business owners are happy about free organic search leads from Google. However, in today’s competitive market, those organic search leads only go so far before business owners need to invest in a targeted SEO strategy to get more leads.
“The gap between people who are spending money on SEO and people who are not spending money on SEO is getting wider. It used to be about the same as how much you grew your organic search traffic, whether or not you’re buying SEO,” said Matt Bentley, Scorpion’s Chief Data Scientist. “In 2022, the average business without SEO even declined while those with SEO continued to grow at a high rate. SEO is becoming harder. It’s becoming more competitive. Unless you’re an expert, the need to [pay for SEO] is becoming increasingly important.”
Scorpion’s approach to targeted SEO is two-fold: tell your business’ story digitally while attracting new, intent-focused leads.
“The way we feel SEO should be done properly is about making your business better in the eyes of Google and other search engines. We’re not trying to outsmart Google or trick them,” Bentley said. “Google wants to reward the best businesses, content, and those recognized by customers and peers. So everything we do is about that. It’s about educating your customers. It’s about building you up as an authority, and it’s about recognition. Those strategies help your rankings and improve your business and website overall.”
As a local business owner, you likely wear many hats, and understanding each aspect of your business can be time-consuming and overwhelming. Leaning on a partner like Scorpion requires investment to see long-term gains, but it’s imperative to your business’ success to outsource when possible.
“Your most important challenge is determining where to invest and allocate your resources. SEO is different from other marketing because it’s competition. It’s a race against other players trying to compete for the same rankings as you. So, like other competitions, you must be the most efficient possible,” Bentley said.
Algorithms and rankings are ever-changing. While Scorpion has dedicated teams of SEO specialists and experts, we also have another tool to make your SEO as efficient as possible—artificial intelligence.
More Reliable SEO
Artificial intelligence is making everything more efficient, including SEO. Scorpion leverages AI to help specialists and experts identify the most important strategy or tasks for SEO. Human experts still do all the work, but AI can sort through thousands of data points to quickly identify specific opportunities or hidden keywords your business can focus on. AI can also help uncover weaknesses on your site.
In one case study, one of our local plumbing companies utilized AI to improve their SEO. The artificial intelligence identified a theme, such as free estimates, that the company wasn’t leveraging in its keyword strategy. There was a high demand for that particular search term in their market. Our SEO specialist immediately completed the recommendation, and the rankings jumped six pages higher within days.
“In these instances, we’re looking at thousands of data points. We’re looking at competitors and their actions and how many people are searching the keywords. We have historical data on how well those keywords perform in other markets,” Bentley said. “Theoretically, an SEO expert could do all that manually, but it’s a lot of analysis and research. This AI allows our specialists to spend their time on the things humans are best at, the classic SEO work: creating content that connects to your customers and helps build up your expertise, connecting with other authorities in the market, and trying to build up your reputation, making the site more usable with higher conversion.”
A great SEO campaign starts with a great website. Scorpion can do both. Scorpion websites provide the framework and scaffolding at a site and individual page levels for an effective SEO campaign.
“We’ve been building websites for 20 years, and it’s evolved to this perfect mix of elements,” Bentley continues. “The things Google looks at, like do people stay on the page? Do they become a customer? Do they bookmark it? It all starts with having a great website, and our SEO team is just building on that.”
An example of our client’s implementing AI in their SEO strategy is Brownie’s Septic & Plumbing, a long-term client with steady organic growth. In mid-2022, we launched our Ranking.AI and immediately saw an uptick, with the growth rate almost tripling. By June 2023, Brownie’s had already surpassed their 2022 numbers.
Our artificial intelligence, data-driven approach, and built-in expertise from SEO specialists and analysts allow us to accelerate growth at unprecedented speeds.
Diversify Your Ad Spend
Shifting demographics means businesses must pivot and diversify their ad spend by diversifying channels. There’s no question that the days of TV ads, Yellow Pages, and newspaper ads are long gone, but even the search habits of younger generations are shifting from the traditional Google search. This means that if you’ve historically put all of your ad dollars in Google, you’re missing out on potential clients.
In addition to changing demographics, lead costs are on the rise. Scorpion’s answer to the changing demographics and rising lead costs is simple and effective: diversify your ad spend.
“We are focusing on how to diversify your dollars best so that we can look for other advertising platforms outside of just Google to ensure your cost per lead and your cost per acquisition is still giving you a very positive return on investment,” said Ashlie Kim, Senior Vice President of Advertising. “Similar to how you would in the stock market, make sure you have a lot of different asset types to best fuel your business.”
While new platforms and ad channels can be overwhelming, navigating these changes is something Scorpion is adept at.
“If you want to grow your business, you must be willing to adopt new platforms and advertising channels to take advantage of these lead sources while they’re still available,” Kim said. “We want to go where your dollars can be best spent. We build you campaigns on Google, Bing, Yelp, Thumbtack, Angie, and many other premium direct resources.”
A diverse ad stack, combined with our artificial intelligence to help guide where advertising dollars go, helps your ad spend be as efficient as possible. Let’s look at a client success story in action.
For an electrician client, we were tasked with maximizing the utilization of trucks per day. Our job was to get to as close to 100 bookings per day as possible. By focusing on multiple channels, we were able to achieve a more efficient booking system for our client.
“We couldn’t have done this without diversifying channels,” Kim pointed out. “There was an initial spike of the cost per lead versus the total spend, but as the spend increased, we got a good handle on cost per lead and efficiency, and the cost per lead started to trend lower. If we were to funnel all this money into Google, we never could have achieved an equilibrium point with the cost per lead or the efficiency of the dollar used.”
Knowing where and how to move budgets dynamically can take time and effort. Partnering with Scorpion allows you the peace of mind of knowing your ad dollars are efficiently working for you. Scorpion not only tests new channels of ad spend, but we test and repeat success to ensure they’re reputable before implementing them to our customers.
“In the digital advertising world, there is an overemphasis on placing your bids, paying the highest possible price to show up first,” adds Kim. “Scorpion’s approach is to understand the return on investment you want for your advertising dollars, and our advertising systems will then dictate how we place your ads and bid on your ads.”
Let Scorpion help with your dynamic digital advertising dollars and watch your business flourish.
Reputation
No matter what channel or SEO strategy we’re talking about, reputation is one of the most critical components of managing your brand. Reputation builds trust, helps you understand what customers think of your business, improves the customer experience, enhances your customer engagement, and helps you reach your customers where they want to be reached. Today’s modern consumer deems a brand’s reputation primarily by their online presence, specifically their reviews. 72% of customers will not buy anything until they read reviews, while 89% of consumers read companies’ responses to reviews. Spending money on SEO and ad campaigns only to have your customers land on negative reviews or lack of response from your brand isn’t a good look. Scorpion makes responding to reviews quick and easy.
“At Scorpion, we make that front and center for you. You can go in and respond and request those reviews and stay consistent,” said Kirby Oscar, Vice President of Vertical Growth. “It’s important to have that landing pad when they hit your Google business page, that they find a solid review foundation, that’s consistent and up to date.”
Regarding reviews, Google is looking at a few things to improve rankings: review velocity, rating, and indirect effects of a bad review. Review velocity compares the reviews your business brought in during a specified period, versus your competitors. Review rating is how good your overall rating is and the indirect effects of a bad review. Essentially, when you click on a Google business page, see they have a bad review, and select a different competitor, that signals to Google they shouldn’t be ranking that business as high. Reviews heavily influence not just on Google, but other channels as well.
“Customers are generally not a one-click, one-call, one-close. Consumers like to shop, and it’s a balance of trusting your business, feeling it can serve their needs and fair price. Reviews can help with all of those factors. I would do everything reasonable to ensure you earn your good reviews and get them documented,” Kim said.
Today’s customer is used to and expect to share their experience with other customers. From everyday interactions like taking an Uber to a survey after an online purchase, asking customers to share their experience validates their experience and provides an opportunity for you to capture a review.
Let Scorpion Help
Scorpion empowers local businesses to thrive and grow. Using our unique blend of SEO, Ranking.AI, digital advertising, and reputation management, Scorpion has helped 14,000 business owners reach their goals and run their best business. Let us help you run your best business today.
“We have a phenomenal team that will talk to you about goals, and they’ll encourage you along the way,” Oscar said. “We want to set people up for success based on their goals and desired outcomes.”
