Local SEO for Franchises Without Copy-Paste Location Content
Local SEO for franchises usually breaks in a boring way. The brand team runs the website, a franchisee changes its hours, a booking tool swaps a link, and three weeks later the listing for that branch is still sending people to the wrong place. Nobody did anything wrong. Nobody owned the detail. Copying the same […]
Google Ads Negative Keywords That Keep Irrelevant Searches Out
Google Ads negative keywords stop your ads from showing on searches that don’t fit what a campaign sells. Used well, they keep a service campaign from paying for clearly unrelated clicks. Used carelessly, they quietly block the very people the business wants to reach. A long exclusion list doesn’t prove an account is well managed. […]
How SEO for Contractors Brings in Bigger Jobs
Quick version: SEO for contractors pays when the pages match the size of job you want. A page about your company brings in small repair calls. A page about one service, in one area, with real project detail on it, brings in the estimates worth driving out for. Build the second kind and answer the […]
5 Reasons HVAC Marketing Stops Working in Shoulder Season
Quick version: in April and October the emergency calls stop, but most HVAC accounts keep bidding on emergency searches and keep sending every click to a page written for somebody with no heat. Move the budget to maintenance plans, replacement planning and air quality, fix the page they land on, and the quiet stretch produces […]
SEO for Lawyers and Why the Rules Are Different
Quick version: legal search gets decided by practice area and neighbourhood, the results page is mostly ads and directories before you reach a single firm’s own site, and state bar advertising rules limit what you are allowed to put on the page. A firm that builds one page per practice area per location and keeps […]
How Much Does SEO Cost?
Quick version: most small business SEO in the United States is sold as a monthly retainer somewhere between about $1,000 and $5,000, with projects and audits quoted separately. What you are buying is people’s time, so the useful question is how many hours a month that is and what those hours go on. Ask for […]
Branding for Small Business: The 4 Signals That Affect Whether Customers Call
A remodeler in a mid-size metro was spending $3,200 a month on Google Ads. Cost per lead: $210. His competitor, same service area, same keyword bids, same monthly spend. Cost per lead: $80. I pulled both Google Ads accounts on a Monday morning. The traffic quality was almost identical. The difference was what happened after […]
AI Marketing Automation: What’s Actually Working (And What’s Still Just Hype)
I’ve sat in three marketing strategy sessions in the last two months where someone said ‘we should be using AI for this.’ In two of them, nobody could define what ‘this’ was. In all three, nobody had a measurable outcome in mind. The conversation ended where it started: with a vague commitment to ‘explore AI […]
CRM for Service Businesses: How to Get More Revenue From the Clients You Already Have
Looked at a painting contractor’s customer records last October. 847 past customers in the database. Last time anyone sent them a follow-up message of any kind: never. They were buying new leads from an online platform at $45 a piece while sitting on 847 people who already paid them, liked the work, and knew exactly […]