Ignore Google My Business and Lose Concrete Projects To Competitors

Audio Transcript

And we are live Welcome aboard concrete contractors. This is Danny Barrera with concrete marketing crew and your concrete success podcast where we focus our discussion is in helping you become a successful concrete contractor in your self service area. And if you don’t know anything about me or who we are well, my name is Danny Barrera, founder of concrete marketing crew. And what we do is we help concrete contractors and that kind of concrete contractors throughout the United States double their leads with our concrete marketing plan and what does that mean?

Exactly? Well, you can expect to get found online, you can expect to blow up on social media, you can expect to double your leads that you’re getting right now online and get better projects, actually better quality projects, the type of projects that you love to be working on and not the tire kickers that just want a price quote and then never respond back to you. So if, if you, I want to find out more information about us, go to concrete marketing crew dot com, get all the information in there and I invite you to download our free internet marketing guide for concrete contractors.

All you have to do is click on the link right on the homepage. Uh and we’re about to launch our new website. So if you’re watching this video on Youtube, you can see it’s going to be looking pretty nice and uh we’ll be sharing with you guys some case studies. So anyways go to concrete marketing crew dot com and you can find out more information about us there and in today’s conversation is going to be uh surrounding about google my business and why Google my business is such an important in a crucial part of your marketing efforts as a concrete contractor.

Uh you know this, this is 2021 were in May of 2021 you can no longer afford to neglect your google my business listing. And if you don’t know anything about google my business listening, let me break it down for you really quick. If I look for a concrete contract or near me and by the way, this applies for any type of service. So whether you’re a foundation concrete contract or whether you’re a decorative concrete contract or whether all you do is flat work, whether you do commercial concrete, uh, you know what comes up here on the top of google search results is the google ads, which is paid to play.

We’ve talked about that and then comes this right here, which is the google my business or the google listings. This is what we call the money box. This is where the majority of clicks will go to for any type of near research is. Uh, and um if you’re watching this on Youtube, you are seeing my screen. If you’re listening in on the podcast, well, you know that you can make these searches yourself, just look for a concrete contractor near me. Uh, you can go ahead and look for a concrete driveway installation or concrete driveway replacement.

And you can start to get a feel for how the search results come up in your service area. And this is, this is the fun part is if you don’t have your google my business listing optimised the right way, you’re going to just get found for your immediate location. That means when you’re doing that search from your google my business location address and you’re making that search, you probably are and you should be ranking number one. Uh, and uh as you step away from that and you drive a couple of miles out, you’re gonna see your google my business listing disappear.

So uh you know, with that being said, uh not having it optimized for your entire service area, uh you know, it’s going to cost you a lot of money, it’s gonna cost you a lot of money in the long term, like you’re going to actually be losing lead two other contractors and a lot of times unfortunately is less competent contractors. So if you do not have a google my business listing, the very first step, very first step for you as a concrete contractor is to go to google dot com and go to a business that that google dot com business that google dot com and go ahead and get yourself claiming your google my business listing profile.

Uh and that’s going to help you out. So this is the first thing is as you go into your google my business listing, Let me see, I’m not sign into my account right now. Uh You go to uh let me go to continue uh business at google dot com. This is what should come up there, engage with customers on google for free. And um Me. Okay, got it. And what you want to do is you want to go ahead and claim your listing. So you know, basically manage now, it’s going to ask you to sign in with your Gmail account, make sure that it is your Gmail account and no one else’s.

I’ve seen so many cases where where concrete contractors allow their um their employees to claim their google my business listing and uh that employee leaves the company. You know, whatever happens, whatever arguments happened between the employee that maybe they might get fired or whatever the case is, and you lose access to the google my business listening, you lose access to the reviews and now you have to go through a whole process that takes about 15 to up to 45 days just to get your google my business listing back.

So if you don’t have it claimed under gmail account that you own that your company owns, go ahead and get that done, get that done as soon as possible. And if someone else has claimed that google my business access for you. Your number one job right now is to create and verify a google my business. Actually a gmail address, I should say a gmail address that is under one of your your your domain. So under if it can be under your business name, if it can be under your primary name.

But I what I like to do is just keep it separate and a personal Gmail address. So you know, try to get that done as soon as possible. So again, register your Gmail account that is going to be dedicated to the business and then claim that google my business ownership, it’s easy to share, very easy to do in this uh in this episode we’re talking about, you know, how concrete contractors who neglect their google my business paid the price in long term. So one of the first mistakes, like I said, is not having ownership of the google my business listening.

So if you’re listening and make sure that you go ahead and get that done ASAP. Uh Number two is uh not not um not going ahead and getting reviews for your business, you know, that is going to simply cost your clients so you’re getting found. So again, let me go ahead and do the same search concrete contractors near me. And uh, the search results that come up there, you see the first search result that comes up right there. Creative stuck holding the sign. These guys don’t have any reviews and they say they’ve been in business for seven years now.

I don’t know about you, but as a homeowner, I can tell you, I would probably not call those guys. They don’t even have the website listed there. So anyways, I would not call those guys. I’ll go straight right into the next, uh, listening in there, that has 11 reviews. I’ll check their website out. Um, you know, I’ll see if, if they have what, what I’m looking for and then, you know, sequentially go into the next next listing. But that is usually how, how users tend to searches, they go and they research a couple of profiles and this is why it’s so important, so important that you have reviews and not just one, what I found to be a good amount of reviews as a starting point for for A positive, um, a positive performance campaign is having 25 or more positive reviews.

That means Reviews that are four stars or more, right? So if you have 25 reviews that are 25, 4 star or five star reviews, you’re going to be performing significantly better than any other competitor. Even if they have hundreds of reviews. And I can tell you recent means you can optimize your listing in a much easier, much better way. So that’s one of one of the ways that you can do that. Uh, so again, make sure that you are not neglecting getting reviews proactively. One of the best times that you can ask for a review is right after you’ve completed and fulfill your work and the client is satisfied.

Uh perhaps that could be on the walk through the day after. Uh, maybe that could be right on the spot as you’re receiving the final check. But make sure that there is that positive sentiment, that positive energy floating around that is the moment where where your client will be more likely to give you a positive review than not. And the other thing is, is also with concrete, especially right uh, concrete cracks, You know, concrete wears over time. Uh, and you don’t want to be asking reviews two years later when um, even if they were satisfied two years ago, you know, when, when things might have changed, you know, the weather might have changed whatever the case is.

So make sure that you’re asking for a review as soon as you deliver the work and you’re receiving the final payment and client acknowledges that they are satisfied with your work. So again, having no reputation, not having your google business listing claim under your account will Cost you a lot of money. Now let’s go into step number three uh concrete contractors who neglect their google my business paid the price number three way that I’ve seen this happen. It’s not showcasing their work, not showcasing their work. And what do I mean by that is google my business listing hasn’t an app on android as well as an apple app that you can download to your phone.

Again log in to your gmail account designated with ownership to the google my business listing and start uploading pictures of the work that you are performing. And this could be work that’s before um before doing and after documenting the experience. And you can upload multiple pictures at once and I can tell you if you do that, if you just do that and you were to do that for the entire month, you, your google my business listing will not only gain better, better signals from images that are tagged with in different locations, but you’re going to grow your profile, you’re gonna be able to to gain more visibility with the pictures.

Now, another thing is that you’re uploading these pictures a lot of times. You can, you can um, describe what is it that you’re uploading whenever possible. Always describe either give a hint of the location or give a hint of the service that you render if it’s a patio, if it’s a sidewalk, if it’s, if you’re doing concrete coatings, uh, if it’s an epoxy floor and if it’s an overlay, if it’s resurfaced, whatever the case is, got to make sure that you’re showcasing your work. And if you do that for one month, I can tell you this, you commit for one month, you’re going to see a significant growth in your impressions of images.

Now, here’s another way of doing it is having your, uh, team members, your team leads, um, your project managers who are on work sites do that for you. So you don’t need to do that yourself as an owner. Another way is us as an agency. What we do is we ask our clients to just upload their work to dropbox. Uh, so just upload all the work to the drop boxes and what our team does is they grab the pictures and do they do the very same thing for you on your behalf and we take care of all the uploading the tag and the renaming using the right terms and all that stuff.

So it works very well. So showcase your work, showcase your work. And let me let me give you an example of what happens. So if if someone’s looking for a concrete patio, um, you know, this is what happens. Look concrete patio. Uh we get a whole bunch of images right here. You see that right there, right. This also helps out for your visibility and and this is not just for the google my business, but for for here as well. But guess what if I have a whole bunch of pictures with concrete patios and I’ve actually uploaded work of um, of patios here in my profile.

You can kind of see these images right there, You guys see whoever is watching this. You see all these images, they probably have some patios in here. I can bet you they probably do. You know, so this when I say showcasing your work, this is where the images will be reflected. One of the places really where images do get uploaded to, but also in the search results. And then on the mobile devices, mobile apps, images get rendered slightly different than desktop. So it matters right showcasing your work matters.

So if you’re not constantly updating and uploading images of your work and describing what that type of work is and and relating it to a specific location, you are missing out another way. Um, how concrete contractors are paying the price, but not by not being proactive with their google. My business is uh, it’s not answering to the calls that are coming in or not enabling, uh, different options. So for example, one of the things is leads leads that come in so leads that come in via a google my business listing, you know, a lot of times that you know, leads call and no one picks up the phone, Right?

So No one picks up the phone. That phone call goes to waste and no one answers the phone. Google is going to give preference to someone that actually answers the phone because google is going to realize, okay, you know, people are calling their finding this business on the maps, there is action and activity, but the user is going back out out of the maps and not taking any action. So you’re paying the price by not answering the phone number one. That’s very unprofessional. If you’re in business, might as well just have an answering service, take care of that for you.

But otherwise just just get someone to pick up the phone in a professional way. And if the phone calls are over 60 seconds, I can tell you that is a strong signal to Google and Google knows business categories. So I can tell you for concrete contractors. The first call should be no less than three minutes. The first phone call, first phone call should be no less than three minutes between lead capture between capturing the prospects information and discussing brief details on the projects. Try to get the phone call to stay around for three minutes.

Uh, and that is a very strong signal because google is going to realize, okay, you know, this contract was picking up the phone and the other guys are not, so let’s bump him up on, on the, on the positions here. So that’s a strong signal right there that no one talks about, but it’s super strong. Uh, let’s talk about another way. And this is gonna be the last point that we’re going to touch on um, Is how you can differentiate yourself among all uh, concrete contractors in your service area and the Google My business.

Uh, and again, we talked about pictures, which is very important. Uh we talked about reviews extremely important. Getting your 1st 25 reviews case should be an exciting project of its own showcasing your work um, and answering your phone. Now the next step is by actually going ahead and posting your work and sharing your work throughout social media. So here is one of the things, let me see if I can find one example, uh, that that that works extremely well. And if you’re watching this on Youtube, you’re going to see when someone leaves you a review.

It’s it’s great if the prospect or the client at this point can actually upload pictures of, of the work that you perform. Uh, and this is another strong signal because what happens is you see when someone’s looking, especially for decorative concrete, when someone’s going to google in, in researching concrete, resurfacing concrete patios, they’re going to click on the reviews and they’re gonna see. And reading a review, a positive review is one way, but reading a review with actual pictures of the final work, it’s a completely different level, completely different level of engagement.

And uh and users love that. I mean, and users prospects love that. So if you can get and train your clients to live your review. I’ve seen contractors get creative about getting a specific uh, you know, specific type of uh of uh specials, I would call it or discounts if if the prospective client can actually live a positive review. So, again, that’s something that, you know, that that you gotta, you gotta just decide on your own, see if it fits your business, your brand, if it fits you know, but if you want to incentivize your your clients as you finish the work and say, hey look, it would mean the world to me, if you can live a positive, uh share your positive feedback with us on on our google my business and then upload a couple of pictures and uh you can help them out there and you can train someone in your team to actually learn how to do that.

But I can tell you the most, the most interesting contractors are the ones that have their clients living a positive review and then showcasing the final product. You can see I’m sharing some, some visuals right now. If you’re watching this on Youtube, otherwise um you know, that’s pretty much, that’s pretty much one way. Uh The next way is by using google my business posts. Now. Think of this google my business post as a social media post. Give or take right where you want to be posting. You don’t need to post every day.

But here’s another place where you can upload these pictures, right? So you upload the pictures and look at this one, pull remodeling and renovation and then there is a picture of that. Uh so, so again, that’s what it’s in their patio papers assigned. Now check this out. I made the search for concrete patio, right? And look at this school. My business post says patio papers design. Right? So, um, so as you can see there, if uh depending on your work, you want to upload at least 11 post that is related to your service and then use all the different features in there.

And there are other ways that you can differentiate yourself. So um with that being said, what I like to share with you guys here is our local S ceo roadmap which when you reach out to concrete marketing crew by going to concrete marketing crew dot com. You can get to see uh pretty much everything that we do to optimize a google. My business listing is a very intense process. That doesn’t happen in one shot, but it does happen throughout time where there are different benchmarks where there’s a before and after every single month where we have to categorize your business and see what it’s ranking for.

We have to look at internal pages and see what’s happening internally on the site. Uh We have to see what’s happening with the link building activities that are supporting your google my business. Uh and there’s a lot of things in there that you can take care of uh and uh there’s a lot of things in there that you might not have this expertise or the experience to do that. And that’s why we’re here, that’s why we’re here concrete marketing crew. So what I invite you to do is if you’re interested at all in optimizing your google my business listing, figuring out how you can get your business to stand out from the rest and you need help.

Some pointers, you are an established concrete contractor. Head on over to concrete market include dot com. Right now, check out our website, schedule a a free concrete marketing strategy call or download our free internet marketing guide and you will get all the details in there until next time. Guys, thank you so much for watching and thank you so much for tuning into your concrete success podcast. Take care