How To Rank A Decorative Concrete Website On Google

Audio Transcript

And we are live Welcome aboard concrete contractors. This is Danny Barrera with another episode of your Concrete Success podcast, a podcast dedicated for flat work and decorative concrete contractors on how they can learn how to improve their online marketing, how to improve their cells, how to get more leads, how to build their business online so that they can get more of the type of projects in jobs that they love to work on. So here is another episode about SEO And improving your google search rankings.

And if you don’t know who I am, my name is Danny Barrera, founder of concrete marketing crew. And today’s topic is a small piece of the puzzle. When it comes to search engine optimization or SEO for concrete contractors, we actually do have a webinar dedicated for this entire topic. You can go and check that out at a concrete marketing crew dot com forward slash SEO And look for the webinar button in there and then you can just watch the replay for the entire presentation. So that presentation is all about the new SEO

2021 formula for decorative concrete contractors. And let’s go ahead and just get started. So as he all search engine optimization is part of uh the entire concrete marketing plan which we provide here concrete marketing crew. And the intention between all this content. It’s not to pitch you anything but rather to educate you on what you should be looking out for when it comes to marketing your concrete company online to generate in decorative concrete leads online, generating flat work leads online, It all ties in together. And if you look at this this wheel right here which is our concrete marketing plan.

Uh It starts out with your website being the foundation. We’ve talked about that uh in different episodes we’ve talked about the importance of getting found on the google maps and today’s conversation falls under the S. E. O. Dominance getting found in the organic search results. We’ve talked about how Home Advisor help you got Angie’s list, you’ve got triple B dot org, all of those lead generation and directory websites that sells you placements okay. Their job is to sell your leads. And how do they get leads? Well, they position and they rank their websites organically on google, right.

If you think about it, they don’t have a local address or local presence in your service area. So therefore they cannot get on the maps right. Do you think about that now? The maps is very important, Like that’s one of the critical components for a solid strategy. But When I told you s your dominance is just as powerful. Even in 2021, it is very important when you think about where are all these leads generation companies getting the leads from? When you get that clear in your mind, that’s why you start realizing.

Okay, I’ve got to start looking at the S. E. O. Component a lot more seriously in 2021. So that’s where this whole conversation came about. And if you don’t know who I am, I wanna tell you a little bit about myself. Again. The founder of concrete Market include the author of the Digital Concrete Marketing Plan and the host of your Concrete Success podcast, which is what you’re listening to right now. We’re an associate member of the American Society of concrete contractors. Also part of the more born members of the decorative concrete council.

Uh and if you have any questions regarding joining their, feel free to reach out to me. I’ve got a ton of resources and information for you. Also, I’ve spoken at the concrete the course show and other industry events across the country. Um some of our articles are published in the Concrete Core magazine and and other places all throughout the country. Another fun fact is that I teach digital agency owners on how to do what what is it that we do for other agencies. So we’ve been able to manage to grow concrete marketing group to do a very good level in in a in a good amount of time.

And I can tell you our processes, we’ve really worked very hard to to dial in our processes in our system for delivering results to our clients and we teach this to other agencies. We also do this at the enterprise level, sharing this information and our data with franchises throughout the country. So anyways, let’s go ahead and die right in some of the most critical factors to rank a concrete website on google some of the most critical components. Now, you’re gonna hear a lot of things when it comes to S. C. E. O. Search engine optimization, you can you can go to Youtube and just type S. C. O. For contractors and you’re going to get 20,000 different things.

But when it comes to concrete, you’ve got to make sure that the information applies to concrete, whether it’s for flat work or decorative concrete. So if you’re a polisher this information applies to you. If you’re an epoxy uh guy packs installer and you’re just getting started, this information applies to you. If you’re a concrete coding specialists, this applies to you whether you do residential commercial, this information applies to you. So as long as you’re in concrete, this information applies to you. Um and what we’re gonna talk about today is some of the most critical factors that we’ve seen in 2021 really make a massive difference.

So the first one is on page. On page is what’s within your website, what is within your website. I’ll share an example in just a moment here, but we’re talking about on page uh, search engine optimization. Some of the things that we got to look at is how we structure our website and website structure, I don’t want to say is half the battle, but it certainly is the foundation the results that that we get on google for our clients is dependent on how well structure a website is and how well the content supports the structure.

And then we have all these other little hacks and factors that we take a look at. So this is going to leverage based upon that. We have a solid structure website, right? We have the right type of content and on page we start looking at all the services that we offer. So one of the first things that we do when when a client comes to concrete marketing crew or prospect comes to us is we go through this concrete marketing plan strategy session where we map out their ideal website, how should it look, how many pages should you have?

How many service area pages should you have? Right, we’ve talked about this concept before is if you only have five pages for example, like about us, homepage, the services, uh, maybe a contact us and the reviews page, that is not enough in 2021 to work at a competitive level. If you want to start ranking for all the services you offer in all your service area, that means that we need to start creating one dedicated page for each one of those components. I’m not making this up, folks like this is real stuff and you got to take it seriously.

So when I get asked me how come S Ceo actually cost money? Well, because number one is this is not automated, this is not a push button thing. We actually have content writers, we have proof readers, we have S E. O. S, we have web developers, we have uh, graphics team. All of those components get put into one specific uh, into one specific S. E. O. Program that delivers the results for our clients. And a lot of times when you’re learning about SCL, you you start thinking about, well, I could do this on the fly.

Well when you really think about the big level, bigger picture, when we’re pumping out hundreds of thousands of words and uh we pump out dozens and dozens and dozens of pages for our clients every month. You can, you can really start to see that it takes a lot of work that Ceo does take a lot of work. So imagine you taking the time to write out one page for one of your specific services. And that page is uh, is dedicated to might be concrete pool decks. I’ll show you an example in a minute concrete pool decks and you need 750 works right of just talking about concrete pool decks.

Number one is, how do you structure the content? And number two is now that I have the content. What do I need to have in place on my website? So that that content gets rendered according to the right way. So what that when the google bots and crawlers come to my website they can start ranking it higher. You see that’s one of the biggest pitfalls that I see concrete contractors make when they are attempting to do S. C. O. Is they hire a company, they get a pitch and they don’t get any results, they do not get any results. Okay?

You hear that again? One of the reasons why concrete contractors don’t get any results from there. S. C. O. Is number one there on the wrong program, meaning they’ve been sold on sc. Oh but that’s not really an S. E. O. Strategy. Rather they’ve been sold on under a faulty foundation and I’ve talked about the foundational elements first. Right? So you need to have a a solid plan so that you can execute. And that plan is backed by keyword research like this is assuming you already know the keywords, you already know the trends, You already know the search volumes and once you have that in place, boom now we start with their own page.

So one of the things I want to show you right now is let me minimize this is just like your right to an example. So on page we’re talking about one page for each of the service uh in the main cities. So you want to see the target cities, right? And then The main services and then we want to look at the titles and the H1 and you are else etc, the images and then the content. Right? So pages, um, titles and on page optimization and content for all the pages, we’re gonna go ahead and take a look at that right now and I’m gonna take you into google and uh let me see here if I could do this um as a guest so that there’s no record.

So what do we do here? What do we have here? Let me see the term that we should be looking for? Concrete pool decks, Nashville. So let’s go ahead and just look for concrete pool decks Nashville. Okay. And that will take just a moment here. And if you’re watching this, by the way, if you’re watching this on Youtube, make sure you hit a like to like and subscribe button. It helps the algorithm here, uh just helps it so that this content gets shown to the right individual.

So again, we’re going to go to concrete pool decks Nashville. Someone looking for a concrete pool, the contractor. Right? So the first organic search results here, underneath the maps, it’s one of our clients right here. We’re gonna we’re gonna click on it and we’re gonna go through those on page factor. So why is google choosing to show this specific page? And again, number one is this page is built to convert and number two is. This page is also built with the mobile optimization already in place. So we’ve talked about over 60% of the traffic is coming from mobile devices.

So when you pull this website on a mobile device, you’re going to see a big difference. So number one is the picture of the background, is a pool deck and it’s a decorative concrete pool that this is a decorative concrete contractor. You can see this is part of the H1 tag that includes some of the key words like pool decks, concrete pool decks and then uh the city and the service area which is serving Nashville and surrounding areas, followed by a call to action. Now, when we keep scrolling down, you’re going to see that there’s an introductory paragraph, actually, two paragraphs there, followed by by another H tag.

And then we have the gallery for photo gallery. You see, if you don’t have a photo gallery in meaningful photo gallery, you are losing uh two like you are losing a lot of traffic because people are just going to hit the back button and not be able to connect with what you offer. So someone comes here, they find this um contractor ranked on the page, one of google on top. Now they see your work. The next action is either they’re going to request a consultation or give you a call, right?

And and if someone keeps crawling down, uh there is more content as you can see there and there’s more content. Another call to action and it’s interactive and there’s some social proof right here with Yelp Google trip will be dot org, some of the most frequently asked questions. A couple of more reviews here towards the bottom. As you can see here when I look at this website. Okay, as as a potential uh, potential client, I can tell you, I have all my questions insert. Okay. And then I’m gonna go back and then I’m going to look at everyone else’s website and I can tell you the majority of websites are not set up to convert.

So, uh, this is set up so that we have the best shot for our clients. So, uh here, as you can see, this is a ranking website. Let’s go ahead and take a look at some of the technical components that we have in place. So we look at the title to step out of concrete pool decks and then it mentions the city and then it mentions the brand. And then when we look at the headings, which is the H one H two, H three’s, the headings are almost like the guide, the guide for the google bots, so that when they crawl the web site, he tells them where to go, he tells them what that specific section is about.

So in this case it tells the H one is concrete pool decks by mentions the brand name and then serving Nashville and surrounding areas, H four followed by concrete pool the design ideas. So, if someone is looking for the design ideas, right. Guess what we can actually rank for that term. Right? So, uh, there’s another age to here which has, which says turn your plain plain concrete pool deck into a work of art. As you can see here. I am not putting in Nashville left and right.

I’m not putting in Nashville five times. I don’t need to use Nashville 20 times on this specific page. This is a targeted page for this specific content right there. Like there’s a very specific job here. And when I look at this, this is 1000 words worth of content here on the specific page. And when you go through the, through the page, it doesn’t feel like 1000 words. It really doesn’t right. It’s structured in a way that’s built to convert. So again, that is part of the H one tax. You’ve seen the content there and then you’ve seen the images.

And if you have some multimedia, like you have videos, that’s where you want to start putting the videos. This is what no one else is talking about guys Nowadays, when it comes to S. C. O. Is what should you be shown showing and using on your website so that you can rank higher. I’m showing you a real example here of a ranking website. So you’ve seen that right there. Second thing is claim and optimize your google my business. So again, you’ve gotten your website structure, the right way is built to convert and then you implement the on page strategy based on keyword research.

And then once you have that tightened up, you gotta make sure at the same time you are optimizing you google my business listing and uh and that’s claiming first, make sure that it’s under your ownership, not your employees, not your spouse is not anyone else’s but the main business owner. Okay? And if you are a partner in a company, make sure that you also have ownership. Uh and I believe you can only have one owner, so just make sure that the account is registered to a business domain. Okay?

So that if at any point in time there are business disputes and you have partnerships, no one except the company is the sole owner, that’s the way it should be. Uh Number two is make sure you add this uh Your your business name, address and phone number to some sort of data aggregators or citation management. So yes, it is one of the services that’s very well known. You don’t need to pay you next. Uh you can do this manually, we do this in house as a combination of manual process as well as some some paid memberships like text and uh there there are really no downsides at the end of the day when in 2021 when you pull out of yes, when you stop the subscription there there is no negative impact as it used to be a couple of years ago.

So I just want to clarify that for contractors. Uh Third thing is uh data aggregators, Data aggregators guys, this is what google crawls to verify whether or not you are a real business listing. Like fake businesses do not put themselves into data aggregators, fake lead generation businesses on google. Do not put themselves into data aggregators. Okay. And that is a major differentiation between people that are succeeding on google and the ones that are not businesses that are succeeding in the ones that are not. So data aggregators, I would say that’s that’s having more weight than than just a regular citations.

So we have a list that is of the most relevant citations that every concrete contractor must have in place. And also looking at the grand grand grand scheme of things. Like we look at local citations, right? Local website directories. So we gotta make sure we optimize your website so that it’s in local website directories also into niche or your specified type of, of projects or, or expertise. So if you’re a flat work contractor, maybe we only focus in, in, um, in the concrete directories that are online, we don’t focus in epoxy, right?

If you don’t do a poxy and all you do is drive within patios and you’re not doing, uh, you’re not doing your taxes. Why should I put your business there? Now, if you’re a decorative concrete contractor and you do all of them, then the beauty about this is that you can get a lot more uh, different niche directories pointing back to your website, building that relevance. And then we start looking at uh, the citations uh, that are being built every single month that she must be and should be relevant to the specific business category, to the business geographical area.

And then any time we can get involved into any community type of of projects, then make sure that you, uh, you ask to get shared or get linked back to your website. So any time there are fundraisers, local fundraisers and you participate, you tend to get a link anytime you sponsor a sports team of some sort, you tend to get a link anytime you join a chamber of commerce, for example, you tend to get a link back to the website that helps you out for number one to google my business as well as the organic search results.

And I can tell you my friends if you’re watching this and you’re listening to this. Uh, that right there, That right there is really is a critical factor for winning in 2021 and beyond. It’s no longer about quantity of back links. It’s the quality, quality and relevance. Uh, and then right after that, like every single month, some of the critical factors we’ve talked about on page, your google my business. And now let’s talk, let’s talk about the ongoing content. Like we’ve talked about this, right? So, ongoing content that supports the specific services that we’re trying to rank for supports the specific services that we’re trying to rank for.

So we will look at this client right here. We wanted to get him found for decorative concrete. Like you know, hey, we want to make sure that this client gets found for decorative concrete. And I’m going to show you right now really quick. If you’re watching this, by the way, If you’re listening to this, make sure you give us a review on Spotify or Apple. We would really appreciate it. Make sure you, you like and subscribe to our channel and on Youtube. If you could give us some feedback there, if you can give us some thumbs up and subscribe to the channel is going to help us share this information with, with a lot more concrete contractors online.

So as you can see here, we built a couple of articles. I think I shared this one the other day where we write a piece of content based on, on on what we want to rank better for or what we want to improve. So in this case, we talked about how this uh, kind of concrete contractor, um, you know, the specific specialties concrete staining and uh, the topic was five things residents should homeowners should consider before staining the their concrete. And that specific article was not just published on the website, but it was also syndicated.

It was also check this out. It was also syndicated across the web. Okay. And it was mentioned and featured in all these news publications in a beautiful way. Like it actually mentions the brand of the client. It mentions the google, my business listing as you can see there. So it’s not just content that’s just floating around its content that’s getting indexed. And google is giving the full attribution of that specific content over uh, from all these different news websites over to our client’s website. So that’s given trust authority.

It’s given a lot of different signals which are the signals that should be leveraged nowadays, which is expertise authority and trust. Right? When google looks at a website and there’s content that’s been published, Google wants to know, hey, is this is a person that’s right in the content here? An expert in this subject matter in this location, Number two is in an authority figure. And # three is can we trust it? How do we trust it? Well, if you think about all those different factors I shared with you right now, That’s basically plays part of that entire strategy.

Uh and what you want to do is make sure that the client, the client, um, and when I say clients is our clients, what we want to make sure is that our clients are getting 100% unique content and we put them as authority figures in the space. So imagine you’re leading big projects. You know, if you’re a polisher and you specialize in specific types of applications or you’re codings specialist and you specialize in different types of coatings applications, what can you write about? Well, think about all the different applications.

You know, aviation hangers, you got kitchen floors, you’ve got restaurant floors, you’ve got anti slip surfaces. Uh You’ve got school um Epoxy systems, you’ve got gym floors. You got I mean you’ve got so many different applications and verticals that you can write content about. So it doesn’t always have to be homeowners. It doesn’t have to be targeting content for for the same old garage floors. It doesn’t always have to be content for pool decks. You know rotating the content coming up with a calendar that helps you stay fresh and relevant is what will give you an edge.

And this works all the time. So so again look here’s the thing the new S. C. O. Formula. Uh Number one thing is set up a great website with pages for each one of your services and in each one of the cities that you service. Very important now that that’s got to be relevant. Let me go ahead and see if I can show you this example and this is a fairly new website here. So as you can see there there is in locations website and when we come here and we go to the one of the internal, um, internal service area pages, the city pages.

And we want to go ahead and google, just go ahead and take a look at decorative concrete contractor in this specific city here. And we scroll down, you can see that the website comes up right here. It’s a, like, quite literally, we just launched this specific page here. Let’s go ahead and do another search right here. I’m gonna take this one. And depending on the competition, like that’s the thing guys, this is like your casting the net you’re casting and at the moment that you start doing this, uh, it’s the moment that you’re gonna start to see, wow, this really works.

So you can see again one more time and now we get to optimize from here and we get to tell google this is our client and this is or this is this contract or not our client, This is this specific concrete contractor, decorative concrete contractor in this specific service area. As you can see their top five position in a fairly short amount of time. I think this has been less than less than um Less than 45 days if I’m not mistaken, that this pages have been up. And sometimes you can see this like this page is coming up number one right here, that could have concrete contractor uh in this specific area.

And I’m landing on the page and there you go. You know, it’s right here, it’s all right here. Like, you know, someone lands here, they’re gonna know who the this contractor is, what they do, what’s their service area and they can explore the different services. So as you can see here, this is a very powerful strategy. I’m showing you real ranking website that I can tell you if you optimize is the right way you will show up for all these different services. Uh, in terms. So again, set up a great website with pages.

Number two is get your keywords and geo modifiers meaning the cities that you service in each one of your titles and meta descriptions. Okay. Number three is make sure the content that’s on every page is unique, unique content is what wins the day, unique content is what wins the day. Okay. Uh, number four is leverage multimedia or when I say multimedia could be a video. If it’s a video on Youtube, make sure that the video on Youtube is titled the way that or with the specific keyword.

Okay, specific keyword that you’re trying to serve. So for example, if we’re looking at pool decks right now, it would be great if we have a pool deck, um, pull the pool deck design or the pool deck prep our pool deck prep, um, methodology. Right? And you can talk about how you prep up to either tear and replace the pool deck, how you work with um homeowners that want to get a new pool deck. You can talk about that process or you can showcase the work before and afters and just give him a slideshow picture after picture.

Put some music on the background. I can tell you you don’t need to explain. But as long as you have a video that’s got the title, our pool deck remodeling, concrete, pool deck remodeling process and then you put the brand name and you embed that video on your website in that specific pool deck page, it’s gonna let google know that this patient about this specific topic and when google crawls to the website, reach your content, sees that video room, it’s going to give it preference over competitors that do not have that.

Now, if you don’t have a video, you don’t have the time to put it together. You can use images like I’ve shown you the image galleries we use is relevant in building relevance from that perspective. Very important. And then we go into, uh, a little bit of off page, which is building online reviews across the web, make sure that you’re consistently getting reviews. Reviews did not have a direct impact into a website. Now, what we’ve noticed is over the past, probably a year and a half or so.

Yeah, more. More so like two years, the more positive reviews in the more active a google. My business listing is whenever we have that google my business listing, linking to the website, it almost that google starts to trust that website more. You may be asking why? Well, it’s just a ranking factor of engagement and brand brand, brand brand tends to be a very big ranking factor nowadays. So the bigger your brand easier the website is to run. So again, getting online reviews for your brand very important.

Uh, and then build your citations. We talked about the different types of tight asians here when you keep that plus optimizing your content and then posting updated content that supports your services and your service areas, building the trust authority links that I’ve shown you here and you, you leverage some sort of paid search to start boosting all these different keywords that you’re not showing up for. That is where you start really, really feeling the big difference for the type of jobs that you want. So when you hire concrete marketing crew, we handle all of this for you.

And it’s a scary process. It really is like I’m sharing with you right now, one piece of the puzzle. And when you start to do that, one piece of the puzzle by yourself or you hire someone uh of a craigslist or someone that’s a friend of a friend, someone that’s a nephew of a friend. You know, you start to realize, hey, I get it like they’re trying to help me, but they just not getting results. Or maybe you hired a generalist SEO company or generalist inter marketing agency and they just haven’t been able to deliver, Well, it’s probably because they haven’t followed the process.

Like what I’ve shown you here, like we’ve outlined the entire process and what you can do here is what I like to do is invite you here. If you’re still listening to download our free S. E. O. Checklist for decorative concrete contractors, uh it’s actually called The Ultimate into marketing checklist for decorative concrete contractors. And it’s a two sided uh checklist. And you can go through this process on your own. So you go to concrete marketing crew dot com forward slash free, check it out and I’ll send you some other goodies in there.

You can check out our video and if you have any questions, feel free to post them here. And if you are listening to this, uh make sure you subscribe to our channels here, your Concrete Success podcast. And again, this is Danny Barrera. Thank you so much for tuning in over and out. Have great rest of your day.