For our first episode of Rolloff Rundown, we interviewed Tim Coe, our own Director of Digital Marketing. The topic of this episode is free and paid methods on digital media to get dumpster rental leads.

Transcript:

Matt: In this episode of Rolloff Rundowns we’ve invited Tim. He’s a 20-year veteran in doing digital marketing for small businesses and we’re lucky enough to have Tim on our team. He actually helps our customers attract more people to their website so they can get more sales. And that is the topic that we’re going to talk about today. How do you get more leads by marketing your business online?

All right, so there’s lots of things that people could do, we hear things like SEO PPC do this do that but from an expert’s point of view, I want to hear it from you what is your top thing that people should be doing to attract more leads to their website?

Tim: That’s an excellent question, one I get asked all the time and you’re right there’s so many different things out there that people are told as far as like do this do this do this and the clients that I talk to they get so overwhelmed with everything that’s coming at them. And kind of what I let them know is the easiest thing that you can do, if I owned a roll-off dumpster company this is the first thing that I would focus on, would be reviews. Getting more reviews for your business, first off it’s free to do um it’s easy to do and you have all these people out there saying SEO this and you got to rank and stuff like that reviews are one of the biggest ranking factors for local SEO today so to come up locally in your local city um if you want to start coming up for keywords you need review more specifically in Google.

Matt: Great! So you know what are some ways that people can encourage their customers to leave a review?

Tim: So the easiest way and again, a question I get all the time probably the most common one from clients is how do I get these reviews how do I do it. And it’s actually incredibly easy, you ask. Now there is a time frame that you want to ask in that is more beneficial than anything else. Generally right when you complete the job is when you want to ask for that review. And you can do it a couple of different ways and it just really depends on what you’re comfortable with but also what your clients are comfortable with and it’s either email or texting. And there’s a lot of different ways to accomplish both of those, but the email or the text; the simpler the better. It’s just sending them a text letting them know you appreciate their business and to help out a small local company that’s trying to grow please leave us a review if you enjoyed our service. It’s as simple as that will get you fantastic responses from your clients and then you’ll just have a link to your Google review in there. They’ll click on it leave their review and you’re good to go. And that’s the companies that I’ve worked with that have hundreds of reviews that’s generally what they do.

Matt: So it’s simple as asking?

Tim: Yeah and it’s you do want to ask right after the job like once the job is done they’re excited about what you just did they’re really happy with everything, it’s fresh in their mind that’s when you want to hit it. If you wait even a week or more it’s just like with an incoming lead, you don’t want that to sit there and get cold, you want them to remember you and so if you ask right when they’re finishing up, leave us a review we’d really appreciate it, that’s when they’re most likely to. In my experience, if you wait even a week or more, it’s going to drop off by about 80% as far as your ability to get those leads.

Matt: Makes a lot of sense. Why is that important when you know considering how do I get more leads to my business why are the reviews so important?

Tim: So one of the things that I tell clients a lot is, and I use this analogy, and I call it the Amazon effect. So basically what it is is Amazon has changed the way that we do business and the way that we search for services now I know for me personally when I go online and I go onto Amazon and I’m looking for a product and I type in windshield wipers. You’re going to get a thousand options that come up and you don’t know which one to look at. Well, what people do is they look at which one’s the most reviewed, they don’t care what’s number one or number two, number three anymore, they don’t. They’re looking at which one has the most reviews and that’s the first one that you engage with. And it’s the same with local businesses and Google is very aware of this. It’s why when you type in roll-off dumpster rental near me, the first thing that comes up isn’t actually the search results, it’s a little map that shows all the businesses that offer this service and the first thing you can see is their reviews. So Google’s very aware of this effect and they’ve redesigned the way that search is done because they know that people search by reviews now.

Matt: It makes a lot of sense. How do you handle when someone has a negative review? I think that’s alot of companies out there, they’re scared to ask for reviews because they think there’s going to be negative ones. But how do you handle that?

Tim: So negative reviews are inevitable… inevitable, they’re going to happen no matter what. Every company out there runs into negative reviews and the best way way to handle that is to respond to it. All of your reviews actually whether they’re positive or negative, you can go in there and actually respond to every single one of them and it’ll show that it’s coming from the business owner, which is what you want because when someone sees that, it’s like man this business owner is engaged. And when something negative comes up you don’t want to respond to it in a negative way be very positive and just let them know, it can be very simple like, we’re sorry that you had that experience, please reach out to us at this email and we’d love to work with you on that. It’s as simple as that, that’s all you need to say, but it shows that hey this guy didn’t have a great time we want to fix it and see what we can do to make it right.

But the other thing too is all of us know that there’s people out there that are never going to be happy no matter what you do. Everyone understands that and so one of the things that I do when I’m looking for businesses, if I only see positive reviews, I actually don’t trust it. And most people don’t because they’re like no they probably asked all their friends to leave these reviews, you know?

Matt: Yeah or filtered out the bad ones.

Tim: Yes and so seeing the bad reviews in there lets you know that they’re real, and then seeing that business owner interact and engage lets them know that the business owner cares. So the best thing that you can do is engage him.

Matt: Yeah I like that because you know it’s how the business responds is usually the perception of your business, it’s how you respond I’ve seen businesses that actually they they get angry in their response and that makes me think like I don’t want to deal with that business, as this business owner might do that to me. But if you respond to every single one of your reviews, positive or negative, you know, hey thanks for the great review or hey I’m sorry you had a bad experience I want to fix it then at least people are seeing that right? And I would guess it helps.

Tim: Absolutely, it shows that you’re engaged with your business and kind of like what you said if and I’ve seen that too where business owners come back and they’re like yelling back at them and you’re like that’s not the place for this. And that’s when a bad review becomes worse, it’s when you engage in a negative way now you just messed things up. So don’t do that, just reach out to them let them know, hey we want to make things right, reach out to us and take that conversation offline.

Matt: Yeah that makes a lot of sense. Okay, let’s talk about one more aspect of reviews as it relates to being found online and Google you know, almost rewarding you. Does Google look at their Google reviews and reward you for that if you have some or many how do they think about it?

Tim: They do. So Google reviews nowadays are probably one of the biggest ranking factors for local businesses. Now this is where SEO and reviews and local SEO and all these terms get thrown around and it gets really confusing, but for a local business, Google’s fully aware that you’re a local business, they know what your service area is and they know that you operate within that. And so they know that most people in that area are going to be typing in dumpster rental near me, something along those lines and so they keep it that’s that’s what they’re looking for is how are you doing locally and reviews are the biggest ranking factor to that. It tells Google we’re doing really good locally, people like us locally, people love us locally, and that’s one of the best things that you can do as far as local SEO.

Matt: All right so reviews matter, got it. What’s the number two thing that matters to get people leads to their website and get more dumpster rentals rented?

Tim: So it still goes back to Google because Google is still king.

Matt: That’s where most people are search anyway.

Tim: Right it’s I mean the statistics are always changing but it’s something like 95% of searches are done on Google. And so you want to make Google your best friend and any tools that they’re providing you, want to make sure that’s the first place you are. And that’s where Google my business or Google business profile comes into play which is you set that up for your local business, it’s when you search it you can see it on the right hand side, there it has all of your business information, it’s also where your reviews live so that is huge. Making sure that that’s not only set up but also accurate, it’s going to ask you to have your address in there, phone number, email, link to your website, stuff like that. You also want to make sure that you have images in there. It actually started off as social media to go up against Facebook and so the reason why it has images and actually you can do blog posts and all sorts of stuff with it, when Google looks at it they kind of look at it as how filled out is this profile, and the less filled out it is, the less serious they’re going to take you. It’s kind of like if you if you have a job posting and someone sends in their application but it’s only half filled out, you’re not going to take them very seriously. And it’s the same with Google.

Matt: And I know Google uh I’ve been in Google my business profile or setting up for you know ServiceCore, Docket product and you know it gives you like this little progress bar to help you say like it’s green because we filled out, a lot it’s yellow, you need to keep going. What are some of the most important things that you should fill out to make sure you hit that green?

Tim: So, the most important thing is you have your logo in there. You also want to have, like, three to five images in there. You want to have a link to your website. You want to have phone number, email address, hours of operation. There’s an FAQ section that you want to fill out. Because people actually really do engage with FAQs.

Matt: Like, what should they have for FAQs?

Tim: So, it’s any common questions that people ask. So, you know, what size dumpsters do you carry? Now, a lot of people will be like, “Well, that’s on my website.” I get that, but they’re not on your website, yeah. So, you want to make sure that all the information that people are asking is really easy to find, no matter where it’s at.

And some people will ask like, “What’s our pricing?” And you can answer that with either provide the pricing or let them know it’s on our website or contact us or anything like that. But making sure that you have all the common questions, and it’s something you can always add to and take away from down the road. And then the other thing that you can have on there is you can actually have your dumpsters as products on there. It does have a product section on it. So, it’ll show what products do you offer, and it’ll be like, “Hey, we have these three sizes of dumpsters.” And if they click on those, it’ll take you to the website. So, it’s almost like a miniature website itself for people to initially engage with. So, making sure that you’re using every piece of it and that you’re also in there setting up your service area is huge. A lot of people will just put their address and leave it at that. Google understands there’s businesses that have services areas. And now when it comes to local SEO, and people always want to be like, “I want to rank in this city or in this town or in this here.” The best way to do it is when you’re setting up your Google business profile is make sure that this is my service area. And it’ll show you how big of an area it is. And now Google knows this is the area that you service. And as you start to get more reviews, you’re going to come up in all those different areas, and not just around where your address is.

Matt: That’s a great tip I as when I didn’t know, so really great. And for those of you that are wondering like exactly where is my Google business profile, I’m going to drop it right here, a screenshot of it so you can see. Like, this is exactly where it looks like when you search a business. So check that out. And then make sure you’re handling your own. Awesome. So, you know, we’ve got a couple good things. First, make sure you’re getting Google reviews. And the second thing is make sure your Google my business profile is complete and filled out.

Tim: Yes, absolutely.

Matt: What is the number three thing that you would suggest people to do?

Tim: So, number three, and so far all of these are free things that you can do, easy to set up, easy to get going, and have a massive impact on your business. So, the third thing is also free, and it’s going to be writing blog posts. Now, this is something that-

Matt: Writing something? I’m not a writer, I don’t write.

Tim: I hear that all the time. Honestly, that’s the main reason business owners don’t do it. But one of the things to keep in mind is Google is in a very different industry as far as like what they care about is content and quality content. And that’s what they’re actually ranking in the search engines. So, when you’re trying to rank for certain keywords that are relevant to your local area, doing a, you know, roll-off dumpster rental in Littleton Colorado. If you write a blog post about that, it’s very likely going to rank because your competitors are probably not doing it. And Google is looking for quality content.

So, writing blog posts, and you don’t have to be writing every single day. None of us are writers, none of us, I don’t enjoy writing, but I’ve done it. And I would say when it comes to writing, stick with your expertise. Write in your voice. You don’t have to create this isn’t a novel, this isn’t anything crazy. You can make it as simple or as long as you want to. I would recommend being at least 3 to 500 words and having at least one picture in there. Now, a lot of people want to go like towards stock images. If you can take images yourself and add those in there, we’ve actually found that people engage more with those than they do stock images.

Matt: Yeah, why not show off your business? You’ve got a truck sitting outside, go take a picture of your truck with a dumpster on it.

Tim: And that’s actually a fantastic point, also putting yourself or your team in these pictures. One of the things that’s missing a lot from websites is pictures of the people.

Matt: Yeah, who the hell works here?

Tim: Yes, and people like seeing who they’re going to be working with, like who might be showing up to drop off this dumpster.

Matt: Yeah, well, if you showed up, I might tell you to go home.

Tim: That’s fair, I wouldn’t blame you either. And then I would, um, but so get creative with it and have a little bit of fun with it. And the other thing too is like you may not enjoy writing blog posts, but maybe there’s someone on your team that does. A lot of companies that I’ve worked for have given away a six-pack of beer for whoever submits a blog post that month.

Matt: That’s pretty cool.

Tim: Yeah. And so, having just anything, kind of make it fun and do stuff like that. And there’s a lot of people that may work in your office that have a creative side that you’re not even aware of. And they could crank out a couple of blog articles. And, you know, and companies I’ve worked for, it’s not about having the perfect article, but all it takes is one, yeah. Um, we had a company that I worked for in the past, and one blog article brought in over 25% of their search traffic, which was massive. And so, if you do one and you do it right, it’s going to have a massive impact on your business.

Matt: Got it. So, let’s use your example of Littleton, Colorado. If I write something, you’ve got to think about what are people searching for, you know. And maybe it’s how to pick the right size dumpster for my renovation in Littleton, Colorado. Like, can you give some examples? Is that a good example or-

Tim: That’s a fantastic example. Like now as a business owner, I feel like you’re probably going to have a pretty good idea of your demographic and who’s coming to you the most often or what questions are you getting on the phone the most often, you know what are people asking, write a quick blog post about it, put that up there because if they’re asking you on the phone or in person, they’re probably typing it into a search engine first.

Matt: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Maybe collect like what are the three top questions we get, I bet you at size, you know, like what size do I need for this type of job, um, you know, and whatever other questions for your business are at the top, you know, that’s 3 to 500 words, especially if you want to get dangerous and use something another free product like ChatGPT. That’s a great way to give it some, you know, hey, I want to write about this subject, it spits you out something that’s free and quick.

Tim: ChatGPT will absolutely crush for blog posts. Um, if you do want to go that direction, the one thing I would recommend is going with the paid version. It’s 20 bucks a month, and its language model is a lot bigger, so it sounds more human, um, and it just, in my personal opinion, it just writes better blog posts. But it makes it really easy. You can let ChatGPT know, hey, here’s who I am, here’s who I’m trying to write it after, this is what I’m looking to do, and it’ll crank out a really good blog article for you that you can throw up, and it’ll take you all about 10 minutes.

Matt: Nice. I think what we should do for audiences we’ll drop a couple of links below to some templates for blog articles that you can just take and modify yourself. But at least it’ll get you started there. Anything else for blogging that they should be thinking about?

Tim: I mean, there’s a lot with blogging that they could think about, but honestly, I think the first thing is just starting it. If you’re just doing it, you’re probably already ahead of your competition. And that’s something that you want to really look at too before you start too much is you’re looking at your competition because if you’re just starting off and let’s say your competition has, they’re doing Google reviews and they’ve been around for 20 years and they have, you know, 500 five-star Google reviews, it’s going to be really hard to compete with them on Google reviews, right? And now, while I would still say yes, keep going after those, because, you know, a couple of years down the road, you might be competing with them. But in the interim, there’s a lot of other things that you can do too.

And one of the things that I see no one doing is blog posts, so they might be coming up locally for dumpster rental Littleton, but they may not be coming up for other terms or questions like the FAQs the clients are asking. If you write blog posts about those, they probably aren’t there, and you’re going to be able to get that traffic very easily and for free and kind of go around the fact that maybe they’re huge. Yeah, so that’s what I would say is just look at what other people are doing. Don’t look too much into it, get that first blog article out of the way, and it gets a lot easier.

Matt: Yeah. What’s cool about this is you know, shout out Josh Roman American AF dumpsters because he has, if you go to his site, he’s got like a handful of blogs, not actually that many, but he’s doing this, and I bet you he’s crushing his competition because he’s hitting you know these blog posts. And it’s something that if you’re looking at your competition like you said, I bet you they’re not doing it. So just kind of look at what Josh is doing, and you know, we’re going to give you these templates and use them. I bet you you’re going to see dividends from that, so.

Tim: You will, you 100% will, because it’s in the 20 plus years I’ve been doing this, I would say maybe 1 to 2% of businesses actually write blog posts, but the ones that do, they crush.

Matt: So, we’ve talked about, you know, SEO and there’s the cost behind that. We talked about the free form of SEO that they can be doing with reviews, with Google My Business, with blogs. Uh, but let’s talk about PPC or paid advertising because this is something that comes up a lot with customers where, you know, PPC is something that I think that people, they don’t really get how much money you should be spending on PPC and what you should expect and what kind of ads you should be running. I think there’s a lot of mystery there because they turn it over to an agency or they try to do it themselves. So let’s start there, can you just kind of, what should a dumpster rental company, if they want to go for PPC, what should they be doing?

Tim: So the first thing that they should be doing is, we’ll start with the most important piece, in my opinion, which is going to be budget and understanding your budget and understanding that just because PPC is viewed as kind of a quicker solution to getting leads doesn’t mean that it’s going to be immediate overnight. It still takes some fine-tuning. So when you’re looking at your budget, you want to make sure that you’re budgeting out for at least 2 to 3 months of solid testing and as far as ad spend, which is what your budget really is, I always recommend to everyone that you want about $1,000 a month in ad spend to start off. That’s a really, really good place to start. Now, some companies can get away with a little bit less, and a lot of companies, you can always get away with a lot more. But the further down you go below $1,000, is your testing, your results, all of that stuff is going to take longer for it to happen, and that’s when you run into talking to clients and say either PPC didn’t work for them or it’s just not a good fit for them or they got terrible results. A lot of times it’s just because their budget was way too small.

Matt: Yep. Yeah, so budget, I think that’s a lot of things, a lot of times people don’t understand that, you know, hey, $1,000 a month sounds like a lot per month, but if you think about average dumpster rental profit, it’s going to be anywhere from $150 up to $250 or $350 on profit. So hey, if I’m getting 10 leads a month from your paid, you’re only spending $1,000 on that, then, you know, hey, the economics work out, you should be doing this. But there’s a key factor that you’ve talked about before that, you know, is so important, that I don’t think people are doing, is a landing page. And how important it is to send someone to a specific landing page versus their website. Can you talk about that?

Tim: Absolutely. So, again, when I see a lot of people trying to do this on their own, this is usually mistake number two, is going to be their landing page. Most people don’t know what that means, don’t know what it is, and they think, hey, I’m going to set up an ad because Google makes it really easy for you to create ads, especially for small businesses or someone that doesn’t know what they’re doing.

Matt: Especially because they want you to spend a lot of money, and they don’t care if you’re doing it right.

Tim: And that’s where Google makes most of their money is with their ad spend. So they want to make it as easy as possible for you to basically give them money. And that’s where it’s great, but it can also be really dangerous if it’s done wrong. And so with your ads, you’ve created the ad, you’ve got it up and running, you’ve got some ad spend, well, where are you sending people? If you’re sending them to the homepage, you just lost.

Yep, it’s a terrible idea. And it goes back to what we talked about before, where when someone lands on your site, you have about 2 seconds to convince them to stay. If they don’t see what they’re looking for in that 2 seconds, they’re gone, and they’re generally gone to a competitor because they’re still looking for this service. So in that two seconds, that’s what a landing page does for you, that’s what it accomplishes, is it gives them what they’re looking for in that 2 seconds.

So generally, a landing page, you can think of it as like a funnel or anything else, but you’re stripping out all the stuff that’s not relevant to the ad that you’re running, and you’re only showing stuff that’s relevant to that ad. So in that ad, if it’s like, hey, rent a dumpster today in Littleton, Colorado, they click that ad, 10% off, let’s say, that’s the campaign you’re running, 10% off, they click that ad, and right there, it’s just like fill out the form over here to get the 10% off for the dumpster rentals. You’re not going to have a header, you’re not going to have a footer, you’re just going to have that information in the form. And that’s what a landing page is, is it keeps them focused on one thing. If they have that header in there, that footer in there, they’re going to get distracted, they’re going to start moving around, and then this money that you’re spending on ads is being wasted because you’re not making sure that they’re focused on one specific outcome.

Matt: It’s also a lot harder to track too because if you send someone to your website and they start bouncing around, they come back later, versus I know exactly who filled out this form, the only place I’m advertising it is via Google or Bing or some of the other ones.

Tim: And it’s like when you’re again, there’s a lot of reasons to get a professional involved, and this is going to be one of them is when you’re looking at Google analytics, when you’re kind of trying to see how are my ads doing, what’s converting, what’s not converting, all of that stuff, a professional can take a look at it and tell you right away and then start optimizing the campaign around that. And that’s insanely important. So making sure that you have that set up on there and so that when you are sending traffic there, you can see what’s happening. And it’s one thing they’re trying to do when you’re sending it to a homepage or even an internal page, they could be all over the place, you’re getting traffic from other places too, not just ads, and it’s just it turns into chaos, and you’re not going to get great results.

Matt: Yeah, another thing that I want to warn the audience about is the types of ads you run are really important, and everything that you’ve described, Tim here, is based on search. I search for dumpster rental in Littleton, Colorado, I get a result that shows a text ad that’s showing up that says, you know, 10% off dumpster rental in Littleton, Colorado. Great, awesome. I click, go to a landing page. What people should not be doing is display advertising. What display gets into is you’re showing your ad to basically anyone that’s interested or not, and 99.99% of the people are not going to be interested. But every time someone clicks, or maybe it shows it a thousand times, you’re going to be spending money, and a lot of times, that money is being spent in places like a weird weather website or tons of mobile apps and things like that. Can you tell us a little bit more about, you know, how to avoid that and why?

Tim: Yeah, so when you are running these ads, kind of like what you were saying is you know, running a display ad would be equivalent to running an ad in like a newspaper for your entire city when you’re looking for something very specific. Or something I always see is like a billboard. Yeah, you see all that traffic going by, but only about 1% of people are going to care what’s on that billboard. So, you’re spending a lot of money and not really getting a targeted result from it.

Matt: Yeah, you can’t track who’s coming from that.

Tim: You can’t, you can’t at all. And that’s what’s most important. So when you are running these ads, you want to make sure that you are just doing kind of the search term ads. You’re not doing this display advertising. And just like we kind of talked about how Google’s in this to make money, they’re going to push that, and they’re going to be like, “Hey, you can do this, we can show your ad to 100,000 more people if you just push this here.” And it’s like, you don’t want to do that because they’re not interested in it. And I see pretty much every platform offering that, it’s very common. Especially on social media when you get into like boosting posts, and they’re like, “Oh man, like 30,000 people saw this.” And it’s like, yeah, but nobody engaged with it.

Matt: Yeah, the only thing you boosted was their pockets.

Tim: Yes, you boosted their pockets. So, and those again, those are kind of the pitfalls that you can run into if you don’t know what you’re doing. And I’ve seen a lot of clients burn their entire ad spend on display ads because they weren’t aware that it was running on display and not on search, right? And where you want to stay focused is the search, that’s where the high intent is, that’s what you want.

Matt: Nice, another thing that people should be highly aware of is the difference of a desktop computer displaying your ads and a difference of mobile and how your landing page that we talked about shows up on those.

Tim: It’s insanely important to understand the difference between the two because with mobile devices, depending on the industry and the website and your demographic, it’s on average between about 60-80% of initial visits are from a mobile device. And a lot of people, like when we’re designing or anything like that or initially looking at our website, we’re looking at it from a desktop, which is a very different point of view. Now, when you’re running ads, a lot of people are looking at that from a mobile device because that’s where your high intent people are.

Matt: You’re laying in bed searching for, you know, “I got this project coming out.”

Tim: Most of us do research on our laptops or our desktop, but we actually do purchasing on our phone. And something that I see a lot is, let’s say you’ve got that landing page and you’ve got your content over here and your form over here. On a mobile device, those are going to stack like this. And so when someone lands on that and they’re looking at it and they get a whole wall of text, that 2 seconds of them seeing what they want to see, they’re not going to see it. They’re going to be bouncing. And so it is insanely important to make sure that you are optimizing for the traffic that you’re going to be sending to it.

Now, this can vary depending on which ad network you’re running on. With Google, it’s a little different. But if you’re running social media ads on Facebook or Instagram, which a lot of clients do because it’s generally cheaper, in my experience you get better results from Google, but it’s a little more expensive. But if it’s from social media, it’s like 98% is going to be from a mobile device. You’re sitting on your mobile device. So, those have to be pretty much 100% optimized for mobile. And that’s something people don’t take a look at either. They set everything up on the desktop, they’re looking at it on the desktop, they’re creating the ads on desktop, they start running the ads, and they’re not doing well, and they don’t know why. And it’s because most of their audience is probably coming from a mobile device, and that landing page that they’re going to is not optimized to convert them very quickly.

Matt: I think an easy way to look at this, and something that a lot of people don’t, is what are your conversion rates and what should they be? And, you know, we can tell you, we do this here at ServiceCore, but we want to see a 5 to 10% conversion rate on our landing pages for our ads. If you see a 1%, half percent, no percent converting, you should ask yourself a couple of questions. Does your ad text match what’s on the landing page? And is your landing page, you know, set up to convert, meaning you have a dedicated landing page, it works on mobile, all the things that we’ve been talking about.

Tim: And when you get into, you know, that conversion optimization, again, it’s, this is a good point where you bring in a professional to be able to help. And one of the big reasons why is you can actually save money. If your conversion is higher on an ad then your cost per click is generally going to be lower because your view is more relevant. And so you can actually save money by making sure that it’s optimized a lot better. And that’s what a professional can do for you, where a lot of clients, if they don’t know what they’re doing, their conversion is terrible, they’re paying top dollar for every single click, they’re going to burn right through everything really fast and again, not have a great experience, yeah.

Matt: So, I think that, you know, we kind of rounded out the paid side and, you know, shared some good wisdom there. I think there’s something that gets overlooked and really cool stuff that you’ve done with some of our customer’s websites is there’s some small tweaks that you can make to uh your own website that could actually drastically raise conversion rates, raise the amount of people that are renting dumpsters from you, can you talk a little bit about some of the things you’ve done with our customers that have helped?

Tim: Absolutely. So, it’s initially kind of the first setup piece is pretty simple. Something I’ve told a lot of my customers to do in the past, a lot of our customers will do, is have someone take a look at their website just as it loads in 2 seconds and be able to tell them what it is. If they can do that and they can tell them what the offer is, then it’s doing really well. If they can’t or they struggle, then something is off with the way that the homepage looks. And it’s generally just a couple of things. Usually, you’re missing a call to action, a book now, contact us, phone number, whatever your call to action is or and this is a thing you have too many calls to action. And so the eye doesn’t know where to go, it’s getting confused, like, “I don’t know what to look at, what’s important here,” and you just lost them.

The other thing too is a trust builder. Like the first thing that’s on there, you should use just a few words, you know, best dumpsters in Littleton, Colorado, that’s it. Now, that’s not something that’s going to stick, it’s not going to keep them, it’s a micro trust builder, but it’s, you’re not getting them to, you don’t need to get them to stay forever, you need to get them to stay for another second, to look at one more thing, and that’s the purpose of it. You’ll build trust as you go. And with those micro trust builders, that’s what they do, is we see it, our brain recognizes it and understands it, and stays on the page because of that.

And then the last thing too is color. A lot of people like to either splash color all over their site or not use any color at all. And color is extremely important in a ton of testing that we’ve done with our client sites is we use color as a way to draw the eye. So if you have any sort of color in your branding, like with ServiceCore, it’s blue, so we use that to pull people’s eye to calls to action. And so you want to use color to get them to look where you want them to look, and that is something that is missed all the time too. Is they’ll have all the text will be black and then their called action button will be also black. It’s like, no, you want that to be a color that pops, stands out. And so by adding that, now you’re, you’re adding trust, you’re adding a clear call to action, and you only want one, and then making sure that that homepage is just simple and clean, and no other distractions. That’s going to get you a lot more conversions.

Matt: Nice, yeah. You see these sites where it’s people, you know, there’s the old saying, show everything, see nothing. And they want to put all the bells and whistles and this and that, and you don’t know where to go. But the simplicity of if I land on your site, I probably got there because I want to rent a dumpster, yes. And if you just make it ultra easy for me, I will do that. And if you don’t make it easy for me, I’m going to go look for the next person on Google who shows up, and I’m going to rent it from them if their site makes it easier. So that is really important stuff.

Tim: No, and then and then one last kind of tidbit that I’ve experienced in the past two with doing paid ads is when you’re looking at testing different things for conversion optimization, there’s a million different things that you can test as you and I both know, which is where a professional comes in. But one of the weirdest ones that I found out a couple of years ago was when I was running ads for a company, and usually I always thought, like, you know, number one, you always want to be number one, top spot, that’s where you want your ad to be, that’s where everyone looks. That’s not actually true. We actually had really good testing, putting in either position two or position three on the ad, and people still converted really well. And as you know, position two and position three can be cheaper, and it can give you bigger conversions.

So, there’s so many different little things that are going to give you a much bigger experience. And it’s like if you know those little things, you can test them, that’s where a professional comes in really handy is they do know those little things, but testing everything is so important, for sure.

Matt: Makes a lot of sense there’s you know, geeking out a bit by their studies of how people consume a web page is in an F shape. So you’re looking across the top, your eye quickly goes to that second part of the F, and that’s where you’re saying like position two or three is right there, people slow down there, and then they go down like this. So it’s that’s the kind of thinking that you should be doing for your business. And I think it’s just missed a lot because others, they just trust someone else to do it for them, or they’re trying to do it themselves and they don’t have the in-depth knowledge to really get the results they’re looking for.

Tim: It’s those little pieces that can make a massive difference.

Matt: Got it. Well Tim, I think, uh, this is a good place to land the plane, and so I just want to first thank you for being here, my brother.

Tim: Thank you so much, it was great being here.

Matt: Thank you to the audience, and we hope to see you next time.