There are over 200 SEO factors that go into getting on the 1st page of Google’s organic section. In this video we break down the basics you need to know including keywords, content, user experience and much more.
What is up everybody? Welcome to the Restoration Rundown Podcast, the podcast that’s dedicated to you, the restoration and cleaning business owner. My name is Ben. I’m your host, and I’m the CEO of Ironclad Restoration Marketing, where I help restoration business owners get more sales just by straightening out their internet marketing.
Now, today’s episode is gonna be a quick, short and sweet one. As you’re driving in your car listening to this or you’re listening to this at the gym, if you need that extra motivation or if you’re watching this on YouTube, thank you for joining us. But this is gonna be a quick one, but it’s a very impactful one because it’s something that every single business owner, whether you’re in a restoration or cleaning industry, or you’re in any other type of service-based industry should be paying attention to. And that’s the almighty three letter word of SEO.
Today we’re gonna talk about how to rank on Google in seven very simple steps. Now there’s gonna be a broad overview. There’s a lot of nuanced little details in between, but in general terms, this is how you need to be operating your business, operating your digital marketing to make sure that you’re healthy enough to rank on Google to get those leads, the organic leads in the evergreen process of search engine optimization.
So number one, you gotta do your research. In my book, The No BS Guide to Internet Marketing for Restoration Contractors, we talk a lot about this keyword research. You need to know what keywords you want to place, and rank on Google for, and you need to see what your competitors are doing. When it comes to those keywords.
Now, once you understand the keywords, and it’s pretty basic, you can stay the low hanging fruit, which would be, water, fire, mold remediation, fire damage restoration, indoor air quality, whatever the type of business you’re in or whatever kind of leads you’re going after, you need to find out what those keywords are and then all the different instances of those keywords and how they’re put together, and looking into how people are searching for those keywords to help you develop into step number two, which is creating killer content based around those keywords.
You need to understand how people are finding the type of business that you do, understanding what your competition, especially the high ranking competition is doing when it comes to those keywords, and you need to create superior, helpful content to help Google understand who you are, and then help the user base that’s using Google to look for people to remediate their property damage and drive them to your website.
Right? So that’s a very high level outlook on this because there’s a lot of different ins and outs when it comes to it to try to maximize. But at the end of the day, you need to have killer, helpful content. Now you need to make sure within that content, right?
Step three, you gotta include some expertise. A lot of people are talking about ChatGPT and AI, and how it’s changing the game for content, and that’s great, but you can’t just rely on ChatGPT, ask it a question or write you an article, and just use that article and spit it out on top of your website because there’s a good chance that most of your competition’s doing something like that.
Also, the way Google’s algorithm work is they’re looking for expertise. They’re looking for helpful content. In fact, there was an update called the helpful content update that is gonna mitigate just that. And Google does have filters that look for AI generated content. So it’s good to use AI to generate content, but you need to put your personal touch on it.
Nobody’s going to be able to speak about your business like you are. Especially, because of how different it is in each and every single region. You know, people, the way they test and remediate for mold and the types of jobs that they’re doing in South Florida is completely different than North Dakota, right?
What people are searching for in South Florida is completely different than what people are searching for in Texas or Oklahoma or California or in Canada, for instance, or in Europe. If you’re in Europe listening to this, I know we have a few European followers, or if you’re in Japan, and I know we have some Japanese followers, shout out to Japan. I love that place. Been to Tokyo and I plan on going back.
So you wanna be able to use and leverage that AI because it saves a lot of time, right? We wanna do anything we can do to help automate our processes, but you have to make sure that you’re putting your own expertise into that, right?
Utilize video. That’s a good way to supplement that content. Make a video about the content that you just wrote, right? But in general, you want to have killer content based around the keywords that you did the research on.
Now, on our website at ironcladrestoratiomarketing.com, I believe we do have a free download, of the top level water damage restoration keywords that’ll just give you some sort of start. And if you have my book, there’s a lot of comprehensive information in there on how to find the right keywords for your business. So depending on, no matter what your service is, there’s some sort of framework to be able to develop those keywords and why.
Alright, the other big thing that a lot of people miss out on is optimizing your images. Images can slow your website down. So, using a tool, if you’re using a WordPress website, some sort of plugin that’s going to help caching policy, whether that’s server side or on page, you wanna make sure that you’re serving images in next gen formats. Anything you can do to optimize images to what Google’s looking for.
Again, if you’re not aware, Google does have a free tool to check your website speed and user experience, which are two huge ranking factors. It’s called page speed insights. You just have to Google it, put your url in and it’ll give you your score. And on top of that, it’ll give you a waterfall of what’s actually slowing down your site or what’s keeping you from getting an A grade versus an F, which most websites have right off the bat. And that goes from mobile and desktop.
So you wanna optimize those images, right? So once you have your images optimized, you also then wanna optimize them for Google, make sure you’re including Alt Tags in those images in the backend when you upload them, or your agency should be doing this in long descriptions.
Google Images is an amazing place for traffic. Now does that translate directly to your industry? No, but it’s another Google property that you can leverage as a restoration or cleaning business owner to get more bang for your buck and squeeze more juice outta that lemon, that is SEO. So you can rank higher on the search engines. The holy grail of getting leads online. All right?
You also wanna build high quality backlinks. Backlinks is something that, it’s a quality over quantity, right? But it’s also still quantity as well. So you wanna have a lot of backlinks, but you wanna make sure that you have quality backlinks. Bad backlinks can negatively impact your ranking factor. In fact, they could get you blacklisted. So don’t just find some company or website to buy back links from. Legitimately build those back links.
Some easy ones are just claiming social media profiles. If you don’t have a Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, TikTok, Snapchat, all those different areas, those are free high authority backlinks that you can have a company profile on.
Another one is your industry associations. Join the RIA, the IICRC, any of your regional associations, because guess what? When you join them and you give them your name, address, your phone number, and your website url, guess what that’s doing? That’s creating a backlink to your website. Okay?
And there are some backlink checking services out there to where you can look at your competition and see how many backlinks they have, who’s linking to them, and then you could actively reach out, have somebody within your office if you have the infrastructure, just email them and say, “Hey, we’d love to be able to have a placement on your website and build that backlink organically.”
Those are always gonna be the ones that help you the most, right? But the high authority websites, Facebooks, the IICRC and RIA, CNR magazine, R and R magazine, subscribe to them, contribute to them, put that helpful expertise content out there, not just on your website, but put it out there in some of these publications. They will publish this stuff if it’s helpful enough.
Teach them how. Teach people that are just starting in the industry how to remediate mold properly or what to do in certain situations, right? It’s the givers gain mentality, but at the end of the day, you get a nice back link to your website.
You want to enhance for user experience, okay? There’s nothing worse than going to a website. That sucks. Okay? So if your website was built five or six years ago, There’s a good chance that you need some updating and there’s a good chance that it sucks. There’s been so many changes to infrastructure, how websites are served on the internet.
So it’s never a set it and forget it type of deal. In fact, we are changing our website like once every two years just to keep up with trends. People are searching differently. They’re looking for things differently. They’re using their mobile devices differently. So if you don’t have a mobile ready website, one, you’re not gonna rank on Google. I don’t care how much money you throw at search engine optimization. It just won’t because they are switched to a mobile first indexing years ago.
So if you’re still not mobile device responsive, you need to catch up with the times and get yourself a new website. Their most native themes or most companies that build your website’s gonna include that anyways to where it’s device responsive. So check that it’s really simple. Pull out your phone. Put in your website and just make sure it’s really easy to go through.
One of the bigger ranking factors now is UX, the user experience. For a couple reasons. One, Google wants that because a user base, we live in a microwave society, I’ve said that a ton of times, people don’t wanna wait. So if your site is slow, that’s bad UX. If your site spins and it takes a long time for images to populate, you’re no good.
So if that’s happening with you, you need to reach out to an agency or reach out to your nephew that built your website in the first place and let’s get this thing updated. The other thing about user experience is, we don’t wanna lose them. Right? So, the benefit of being in the property damage space, restoration space is that people usually have an immediate need when they find you. But if you’re in a cleaning space, or if you have a more passive home service that you’re trying to market, people are, they want to get what they want right off the bat, right? And Google knows that.
So, your website needs to clearly explain what you do. It needs to clearly explain where you operate, really fast. And those calls to action need to be right up there in their face, above the fold. So the first thing people see when they go to your website should be the who, what, where, why. Right? Without having to scroll, make it super easy to get in touch.
If somebody’s looking for fire damage restoration contractor in San Antonio, and they’ve gotta scroll down all the way to the footer of your website to get a phone number, or they gotta go to a contact page to call you, that’s no good, because guess what? Your competition has that phone number. Right there when they visit your website, that they can click on their phone and call them right away, or there’s some sort of lead capture option on the phone, whether you have texting or you’re going through a Facebook message.
If you’re in a cleaning company, you need to have all those processes automated, and you need to have a good user experience, okay? If they’re gonna click through other parts of your website, the same principles apply. You need to make sure you put the important information above the fold. And that includes Google reviews and accreditations and all that stuff. All those usps, those unique selling propositions that make you better than your competition, you need to have it right there. That all leads to a better UX And Google’s algorithm does look for certain UX elements.
Again, the page speed insights tool is a great way to just check up on your website. It’s gonna tell you, a grade A through F, or a percentage on how good your user experience and speed is, and then it gives you some options to remedy that. Okay? It’s a great tool. We use it all the time just to check ourselves up, and it changes a lot, as search changes and as the prominence of AI and Google utilizing AI, things are gonna change a little bit, but it’s all to enhance that user experience. And at the end of the day, you as restorers that have these websites are going to benefit from it. All right?
And last, you need to stay up to date on Google’s algorithm changes. There are so many websites, there are so many resources out there to help you at least get a service level understanding of what’s happening. Okay? There’s a good chance you’re paying an agency to do these types of marketing for you, and they should have their fingers on the pulse, but there’s a lot of these agencies aren’t, they’re too big, it’s too hard.
In 2020 and 2021, actually in 2020, there was almost 5,000 algorithm updates. A lot of them you don’t really need to worry about. Typically if you’re doing the right thing as an agency or you’re doing the right thing as a digital marketer, a lot of them are gonna affect you a lot. But there’s a lot of big updates out there, like the update for the helpful content update. There’s a duplicate content updates. There’s updates that made switch to a mobile first. So if those types of updates come through, it really shakes things up and you’re gonna see a significant drop off in traffic and rankings and everything like that if you’re not up to date.
A lot of times these things get released early. So you’ll have these publications like SEO Land, or you just Google SEO News. And they’ll tell you, “Hey, this is coming down the pipeline. Google’s released some information about this. And this is what you need to do to stay on top of it.”
That’s very important, especially if you’re spending a bunch of money for an agency to make sure that you’re holding them accountable or you’re holding your internal teams accountable for these changes that are going to happen. Now, are you gonna be able to stay up on all 5,000 of these updates? No, absolutely not.
But getting a handle on the top three. Are gonna put you much further ahead than the people that are using these big brand digital marketing agencies that are just setting and forgetting, right? We don’t want that. So you gotta keep your fingers on the pulse, by book, right? I published my book I think three times. We’re in a third edition of the same exact book because there are so many updates out there.
Recently Google My Business went to Google Business Profile. The way Google ranks you based off your maps and your local service for service-based industries and your website ties together changed quite a bit. How you rank changed quite a bit. So, if we didn’t know that, I’d still have a book out there that people are buying that had bad information in it, or just old information. Right?
In general terms, a lot of this stuff is really good. Just doing the minimum is gonna get you above the competition, but we don’t wanna do the minimum. We wanna maximize your potential of getting those first page ranking. So, subscribing to newsletters for SEO land, or any of the journals. Neil Patel’s a great follow on Instagram or on any social media. He kind of, gives a lot of tips and updates, stuff sometimes doesn’t directly correspond with the service-based industry, but a lot of times it does. You just look, learn as much as you can from as many people as you can. There’s so much free information out there.
I implore you follow along with Ironclad Restoration Marketing. My company, we’re making videos every single day. My website has 400 videos on it that are linked to my YouTube.
We run this podcast, quite a bit. Just to help you stay on top of things. Get my book if you haven’t got it. There’s ways to get the book for free but it is a cheap buy on Amazon, either the Kindle version or the paperback, and it’s got great information out there just to empower you with the tools and the knowledge to be able to make sure that you’re doing your internet marketing right to where you’re not getting to take advantage of, and you’re not learning those hard lessons of time and money doing the wrong thing and just not winning or just spinning your wheels. All right?
So how to rank seven steps? Research your keywords. Use those keywords to develop killer, helpful content. If you’re gonna use AI to write that content, you need to edit it, put your own words into it, put your own expertise, put city and location specific information out there, because at the end of the day, We are trying to help people, right?
Include images. Make sure you optimize those images so your website loads fast, but at the same time, on an on-page SEO, make sure that you’re putting alt tags and meta descriptions and all that stuff in there. And on the top of that, make sure that your on-page SEO is up to par too. Make sure you have the proper meta title tags. All your heading header tags are done properly and your meta descriptions are in there properly because that’s how Google reads your website.
Make sure you’re building high quality back links. You can do some of the low hanging fruit is getting claiming every single social media platform there is, and putting a company profile on there. Joining your industry associations, regional and national, that gives you some very good high quality backlinks in your industry.
You need to enhance your website for user experience that includes page speed, that includes the flow of information on your website, putting the most important information above the fold, and you wanna make sure that you’re staying up to date with the latest trends, how people are searching, and Google’s algorithm updates.
If you need more information, visit our website. At ironcladrestorationmarketing.com, follow us on all the social media channels, subscribe to us on this podcast, the Restoration Rundown on Apple Podcasts, on Google play, on Spotify, anywhere you stream, and you will get yourself up and healthy and in a better situation than you were before. That’s it for today. I hope you guys enjoyed this episode. Now get out there and check the healthier websites. Check the healthier SEO with this easy seven step tool. Until next time, we’ll talk to you soon.
If you are struggling to get to the 1st page of Google contact us today for your FREE strategy session. Just click on this link > https://ironcladrestorationmarketing.com/get-started/
Benjamin Ricciardi is the founder of Ironclad Restoration Marketing, A digital marketing agency that specializes in the Restoration and Cleaning industry based in South Florida. Benjamin is the author of The No Bulls**t Guide to Internet Marketing for Restoration Contractors and hosts The Restoration Rundown Podcast, a podcast that is focused on everything related to marketing and owning a Restoration and Cleaning Business. Connect with Benjamin and Ironclad Restoration Marketing on social media for the latest tips and tricks on how to grow your Restoration Business.