Matt Smith owns Caliber Gutters, a gutter installation company in San Diego, California.
Caliber Gutters has the same goal as almost every local service business – to get more calls in for his businesses.
In this digital audit, Matt discussed the hurdles and goals his gutter installation business faces in the bustling market of San Diego. The session revealed several actionable strategies that could significantly boost Caliber Gutter’s digital presence and customer engagement.
Organic Keywords and DR Score
Caliber Gutters currently has a DR Score of 0 and is only ranking on 15 organic keywords.
Organic keywords are the terms Google users see when they search for something.
What this tool allows us to see is Caliber Gutters’ ranking amongst others for similar keywords.
The good news here is that there’s little competition – especially for cities outside of San Diego Caliber Gutters can begin ranking on.
For example, all of the keywords listed here are scored at 12 difficulty or lower out of a scale of 100.
Backlinks And Lack of Domain Authority
Caliber Gutters has few authoritative backlinks for their website.
Whenever it says “301” that means much of the link juice isn’t being passed – which means Caliber Gutters isn’t ranked as a high authority website yet.
301’s by themselves are fine, especially since most local citations are 301s themselves. But what Caliber Gutters can do right now to improve is have websites with a higher authority linking to them.
For example, linking to Caliber Gutters right now from BlitzMetrics can have a massive impact on his site – especially since there’s such little authority already.
Caliber Gutters’ GMB and LocalFalcon Results
One of the most important parts of ranking higher is getting great recent reviews on your GMB.
Caliber Gutters currently only has 5 reviews, 1 of which was from a month ago.
While it’s great that Caliber Gutters has all 5 star reviews, the relevance and time in which they appeared matter just as much if not more.
Matt should prioritize getting more reviews in his GMB to signal to Google that his company is trustworthy and does great work in his location service area.
He should also add a more engaging description of his services and link to his social profiles in his GMB as well.
This lack of social proof is also evident in his LocalFalcon report.
To improve this, Caliber Gutters should improve their website content, backlink authority, and trustworthiness through documentation.
Caliber Gutters Should Use E-E-A-T For Their Website
Google’s ranks website’s following E-E-A-T, which stands for experience, expertise, authority, and trust.
A great starting point for fixing this would be to include local service pages.
Since the time of the original audit, Matt has added local service pages on the footer of his website, but there’s a few things he can improve on to make these even better.
For starters, Matt should consider putting these location service pages on his header – not just the footer of his website.
He should also include more details and links within these pages to increase his likelihood of ranking.
For example, for the local service page of El Cajon, there’s very little details or links.
Instead, it’s just a description of his services and not much else.
Matt should be using real examples from worksites completed in El Cajon and mentioning the services he provides in greater detail.
Caliber Gutters should also include PAA questions to increase their authority to Google.
PAA questions stands for “People Also Ask” and by including them on our website, we can broadcast that trustworthiness signal to Google.
We can simply ask ChatGPT about the questions to ask and answer and get answers in moments.
Caliber Gutters should not use any stock art.
If you visit their service page and ask Google to search for it, it returns a few results from other Gutter companies.
The reason this is important to avoid is because it violates E-E-A-T.
We want to signal to Google as much as possible that Caliber Gutters is a real business doing real work in San Diego.
Using The Geo-Grid To Increase Authority
The Geo-Grid is a concept of using the authority of other businesses in your area, or other businesses outside of your area doing similar services.
I like to use this diagram and example we made for Oasis IV Therapy.
The point of using this is collaboration with mutual benefit.
This isn’t anything blackhat and doesn’t violate E-E-A-T as we’re amplifying authority for others.
But essentially, Caliber Gutters should collaborate with other gutter installation companies outside of his local service area with blog posts and videos.
For example, if Caliber Gutters were to write a blog post talking about the 5 mistakes of gutter installation and it was linked to by a company in Boston doing something similar, that would improve authority. And vice versa as well.
Or Caliber Gutters could collaborate with businesses in San Diego who don’t do gutter installation.
For example, maybe there’s another company he refers clients to for roofing.
Why not blog with that roofing company and have them link to you?
This is a perfect example of a rising tide lifting all boats.
Advertising With Google PPC and Facebook
Unfortunately for Caliber Gutters – gutter installation is not yet available under Google’s local service ads.
So instead, Caliber Gutters should prioritize PPC and Facebook Ads using our Dollar a Day strategy.
The good news is that for PPC ads this is fairly easy as we want to target the keywords “Gutter Installation” and have ads appear only in the San Diego area.
In the past, Caliber Gutters has spent over $800 last month with no recorded conversions – meaning fixing this should be a top priority.
For Facebook Caliber Gutters should simply use what’s already working for others.
For example, in the audit we reference a few ads which have been running for a long time with a similar call-to-action.
All of these ads should have the same call-to-action: Get more qualified calls.
To do this, he should integrate CallRail to show the quality and more importantly, to make sure calls generated from ads are directly contributing to an increase in jobs booked.
The Good News: These Are All Easy Fixes
The good news is that competition in San Diego is low for gutter installations.
Meaning that a few tweaks and some patience, Caliber Gutters can easily begin outranking his competition.
In the meantime, they should continue doing great work for clients and focus on documenting it for Google.
They should also prioritize getting more reviews in their GMB.