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Sal Sciorta runs Plumbing Pros LLC, a plumbing company based in Easton, PA – right on the border of New Jersey and Allentown. Sal reached out to us on Instagram a few days ago requesting some marketing help.
Like most local service businesses – Plumbing Pros LLC had been approached by countless marketing agencies promising to deliver more calls. But unlike most agencies, we don’t do outreach.
We don’t sell without diagnosing the issues with digital marketing and outlining a clear plan of action.
In this article, we’ll explain how Plumbing Pros LLC grew to dominate the plumbing market in Easton and how they can build on that momentum to grow even further.
What are our current metrics?
In our onboarding call, Sal explained that the Plumbing Pros LLC website is fairly new – hiring a site builder for $750 to complete the website.
This is good – since most US site builders require $5k – $8k to build a simple website which can be done in half a day by a competent VA.
Plumbing Pros LLC has a DR 2 and 7 backlinks with 5 organic keywords.
For our backlinks, the good news is that there’s no egregious spam. The bad news is that there’s so few, partly due to the website being newer. Whenever we look at back links, we look for relevance and authority of the linker.
For example, linking to Plumbing Pros LLC from a DR 62 site as we’re doing now will increase our SEO substantially. Partly because of our website’s high authority and DR score, but also because of the relevance.
Whenever you pay an “SEO person” for backlinks, they almost always add backlinks which are irrelevant and eventually hurt the website. Instead, we want to include backlinks and articles which boost our authority over time.
For organic keyword searches we’re ranking on our own name, but on the 3rd page.
By increasing our website’s relevance over time, we want to rank higher and higher for this. Eventually having a goal of ranking #1 on “plumbing pros llc” in the United States.
For our GMB (Google Business Profile) we have almost 200 reviews, which is excellent for a smaller local service business.
While a large number of 5 star reviews isn’t everything, it’s one of the most important factors in digital marketing since it confirms that Sal and his team do a great job servicing their customers.
Google’s best interest is to promote businesses which already have a good reputation and genuinely care about their customers.
Plumbing Pros LLC also have recent good reviews with over 7 in the last week alone.
Recent good reviews are almost more important than the number of reviews itself, since Google wants to make sure the business is still active and doing good work in their local service areas.
The good work and amount of reviews Plumbing Pros LLC has generated has made it the go-to plumbing company in Easton by GMB relevance as shown in our map tool LocalFalcon.
In other words, when a user types in “plumbing” in this area, this is the order in which Plumbing Pros LLC’s GMB is most likely to appear on Google.
Through our marketing efforts and since Sal and team want to continue work in PA instead of New Jersey, we’ll be looking to expand west of Easton and dominate Nazareth and the surrounding towns closer to Bethlehem.
What can be improved on Plumbing Pros LLC’s website?
Everything we do for website’s follows E-E-A-T, which is Google’s standards for SEO growth. E-E-A-T stands for experience, expertise, authority, and trust. In other words, the more we demonstrate we’re good at what we do in the area we do it in – the faster we’ll grow.
Fortunately for Plumbing Pros, they already have ample authority on our GMB. Right now, our GMB and referrals make up 80% of our call volume.
The good news here is that our job will be to simply amplify that authority and link it to our website. We’re not starting from 0 here.
For example, we added LSPs (local service pages) for Easton, Nazareth, and other towns close to where Plumbing Pros LLC operates. This is a signal to Google that we operate in these areas and allows us to bolster our presence overtime.
Another adjustment we’ve made is adding Sal as the author of our site’s pages here to show Google he’s the figurehead of the business. This might seem like a small tweak, but it matters substantially to Google to know the authorship of websites.
We also added a PAA questions on each of these pages to rank on questions others are asking on Google already.
PAA questions are what you’ll often see on the first page of search results. These are important to have because we can eventually capture these on the first page results, as well as demonstrate expertise when answering them.
We added “Easton” to the first page of the website and added links to our GMB locations and updated reviews. This is another “experience” signal to Google that we do a good job in the area we claim we do it in.
Fortunately, our website already has service pages which means we can rank on things like boilers and heating installs as our website get’s more SEO juice.
Lastly, this week we’ll be adding more information to our “about us” page on the website. Our about us page should be… about us!
A common mistake local service businesses (and website designers) make here is making the about us page a promotional item. Instead, we want to tell Google and users our story.
For example, we should mention here how Sal comes from a family of trades people and has worked in New York City before. Including stories of Sals work, why he loves what he does, and his business’s goal for services customers in Easton and the surrounding areas.
What can we do to get calls in the door ASAP?
Whenever we look at generating calls for local service businesses, we always look for what’s already working. For example, Plumbing Pros LLC is generating 80% of new customers through their GMB.
This makes sense since they’ve received almost 200 5 star reviews at the time of writing.
Therefore, LSA (local service ads) will be the easiest lever to pull in the short-term for generating another 20 – 30 calls a month once optimization is complete.
Last month Plumbing Pros only received 4 calls through LSA, despite being the top rated plumbing company in Easton.
A reason for this is because they’ve only received a 15% top impression rate for their ads. This means that we’re being outperformed by other plumbing companies in the area.
To fix this, we’ve added 15 images to our LSA account and have begun marking leads as “booked”.
Google claims it wants “at least 4 images”, but if you can add more the better chance we have to rank higher. Remember – all we’re doing is proving to Google we’re a real business that does good work in Easton.
And by marking leads as “booked”, we’re telling Google that the lead quality is good and they can feel comfortable promoting us more often – especially closer to the front of the page.
Similarly, we can also dispute poor quality leads so we’re not charged for them. For example, if someone in Easton calls us to install an air conditioner, we can tell that to google and get a refund on any ad spend.
Because of these new changes and Plumbing Pros LLC excellent reputation, we can expect many more calls in the weeks to come. Especially since LSA and Google’s GMB are linked.
Similarly, some lightweight Google PPC (pay-per-click) for plumbing in Easton is a good idea. Especially since we’re targeting the top of funnel, or people actively searching for plumbing services.
PPC in addition to LSA is the easiest way to generate more calls for Plumbing Pros LLC in the short-term.
For Facebook Ads, we want to start off with dollar-a-day ads targeting Easton homeowners. We can use existing examples in the Facebook library for what works best in Pennsylvania for plumbers.
That way we can start a “local celebrity” effect and generate cheap clicks and calls since it’s so micro-targeted in our messaging. We should also have a FB pixel on our website and do some barebones remarketing for user’s in PA who’ve already visited our website.
This is another easy lever to pull, since past website visitors in the last 30 days are the most likely to call us.
Plumbing Pros LLC’s future is bright.
Sal and Plumbing Pros are the exact type of local service businesses we love working with. The reason is simple – they do good work and have proof of it in Easton.
So many marketing companies promise the world but fail to consider the business itself they want to promote. All digital marketing is, is the amplification of what’s already working.
If you’re a local service business with a 2.5 Google ranking, no amount of digital marketing or SEO work can save you. Real businesses like Plumbing Pros that do good work are amazing because we don’t have to do much other than promote what’s already gotten them so far.
In a few months, we’d like to see Plumbing Pros LLC expand further west in communities like Bethlehem and others as they continue to grow.
Our job is to accelerate that growth by promoting what’s already gotten them so for in Easton and the surrounding areas. And what’s gotten them so far is by doing good work and genuinely caring about their customers.
If you’re a local service business who does the same, check out our $200 Are You Googleable report here to learn more about your website’s metrics and see how we can help.