How Michigan Bat Experts Can Get More Qualified Calls

Michigan Bat Experts is a wildlife and bat removal company in Oakland County, Michigan. They recently approached us asking advice to get more qualified calls moving into 2025.

As an experienced company with years of experience and over 700 Google reviews, they have loads of data and things already performing well which we can help optimize.

In this article, we’ll go over their current data, things they should change to get more qualified calls, and the steps to get there. If you’re a business with tons of reviews and social proof who aren’t getting the kinds of calls they want – this is how you’d fix it.

What’s our SEO data?

As mentioned earlier, Michigan Bat Experts has been in business for over a decade and has racked up over 700 5 star reviews. But surprisingly, this social proof of excellence isn’t reflected on the website.

With a DR score under 2 and only 110 organic keywords, there’s much to improve on so more potential customers can find Michigan Bat Experts organically when they need to remove wildlife from their home.

It’s important to remember that you can’t “do” SEO. SEO is a process of accumulating data for search engines which prove that a business does a good job in their local service area. One of the most powerful ways that’s reflected is with backlinks from high authority websites.

For example, since Michigan Bat Experts only has 50 backlinks and rank so low, it’s safe to assume that most (if not all) of these links are being generated from spammy or low authority websites.

We see that reflected here. Whenever we see an abundance of 301s or lists of the “10 best x in y”, that’s a clear sign links have been bought. The trouble with buying backlinks is that Google sees through it and doesn’t reward us with any link juice.

Since BlitzMetrics has a DR score of 63, a relevant link from us alone in this article will do more than all of these backlinks combined.

For the keywords where customers are finding us organically, you’ll notice that it’s almost entirely branded search.

This isn’t a bad thing per-say, since we want to rank first when someone searches for our business. But ideally, we want to rank on the terms “bat removal”, “wildlife removal”, “racoon removal”, etc. in our local service area in Michigan.

While having 51 clicks on our own name is a great sign of name recognition, it also runs the risk of not netting us more new customers, since most of these are from referrals or repeat customers returning to the website.

To rank on new keywords, we need more content from blogs and more SEO juice so the website has power.

For our Google Business Profile, we have over 700 positive reviews and almost 2,000 organic impressions per month. That’s wonderful and one of the main drivers of now customers. 

Not too much to mention here other than we need to start incorporating the trust signals we have here for our website so we can begin ranking on the keywords we want.

They have more than enough images, social proof, and reviews to prove they do an excellent job at wildlife removal in Michigan.

What About the Website’s Content?

Every change we recommend for the website is by adhering to Google’s EEAT standards. This means using real images, real reviews, and real helpful content based on experience. 

The website homepage is decent in that it let’s users know what the business does and where they operate out of. The form submission is also helpful since it allows customers to request a quote. The phone number in the top right corner also follows our best practices to local service businesses.

The problem is that we don’t want to include stock art anywhere, since it violates Google’s standards. Instead, we should remove all of it and replace it with real images of workers extracting bats and other wildlife from Michigan homes and businesses.

Originally, there was a parasitic link at the bottom of the website sucking juice for another marketing agency. Fortunately, that’s now gone.

For our “about us” page, we have a decent start here in explaining what we do and where we operate out of. But we can include so much more content.

For example, we’d love to hear the story of Sam Sullivan, the owner of Michigan Bat Experts and how he got started servicing customers as a family-owned business. We’d also love more photos of team members, what their responsibilities are, and how they conduct wildlife removal in Michigan.

The more real images, videos, and context we can offer here, the better our site will start to perform.

I love how we have service pages mentioning the type of wildlife removal offered, but we can also go deeper here.

For example, while I love that we have a paragraph explaining the process, more detail is always welcome here.

One of the quickest ways we can begin ranking locally is by adding local service pages to the website. For us, this might include Oakland County, Ann Arbor, Flint, Monroe, etc. around Michigan. 

This way when a potential customer searches for “Ann Arbor wildlife removal”, we have the opportunity to appear among the first results. I like how we have the blueprint for this on a service area page already, but we can certainly flesh this out.

Among a few other improvements, we should also start generating high quality blog posts on wildlife removal. These blog posts should be able to offer solutions for wildlife control by answering common questions and by demonstrating expertise.

What About Generating Quality Calls in the Meantime?

While there’s loads of potential given our existing social proof and performance, SEO is a long-term play. In the meantime, how should we go about generating high quality calls?

The first answer is with Local Service Ads (LSA). And since Michigan Bat Experts qualify for LSA – it’s perhaps the highest ROI thing we can get rolling. Even though we’ve just started running LSA recently, we ramped it up just yesterday by raising the budget from $110/week to $500/week for starters.

We also removed all of the stock art from our LSA and replaced it with real images and EEAT content taken from Facebook and our Google Business Profile.

Realistically, there’s no reason we should be getting qualified calls here for more than $150 at most. And the more content and reviews we receive, the more qualified calls and opportunities we’ll see.

Next up is Google Pay-per-Click (PPC). PPC ads do take longer than LSA to optimize, but it’s going to be the second lever to press for getting more high quality calls. In addition to weekly MAA reports on growth and call volume, there should be weekly reports on PPC iteration so we can continue improving and building upon what’s working.

After LSA and PPC ads, we should experiment with dollar-a-day ads on Facebook by boosting one minute videos in our local service area. This is great for mid-funnel, but LSA and PPC should come first in priority for generating more calls.

What Doesn’t Get Measured, Doesn’t Get Improved:

On our onboarding call with Michigan Bat Experts, I was surprised to learn that there’s no clear attribution yet on where calls are coming from. In digital marketing, what doesn’t get measured doesn’t get improved. So it’s a high priority for us to begin measuring where calls are coming from, the quality of these calls, and how we can increase volume from each source.

To combat this and find where our calls are coming from, we’ll be implementing CallRail across our website, Google Business Profile, and other areas so we can begin measuring call volume over time.

With this data we’ll be able to better optimize and show an increase in quality call volume week-over-week. We’ll also be able to see what channels calls are coming in from, hear the call quality back, and improve from there.

What’s The Next Move?

Very optimistic here for Michigan Bat Experts for generating more quality calls over time. We love working with established brands and companies, since we don’t need to start from scratch. 

Michigan Bat Experts have over a decade of recorded experience in Michigan for wildlife removal – meaning a large part is simply repurposing content which already exists.

We already have abundant proof of MBE’s success through our Google Business Profile and customer reviews. Now, we need to take that social proof and repurpose it to increase quality call volume organically and with paid traffic.

Overall, very excited to get started and start making the phone ring.