Transcript
Joe Troyer: Next up we are going to be reviewing another crazy fun one, a funeral service website audit, so the good old local niches. Let’s pull this up here. I’m going to try not to get too sad on you guys. Carl said I misspelled Hinckley. Yeah, I bet I did. I kept misspelling it over and over, and over again. All right, so let’s take a look at this thing here.
Joe Troyer: First and foremost, this is the company that built the website I guess, found it in the footer. [inaudible] you can’t see text on a page, so I don’t know that I would do that. Not very user friendly either. I mean, that’s not a crazy bad looking site. But this funeral service one ain’t so great looking from a conversion standpoint, so let’s do this. How do I do this? How do I do this? How do I do this? How do I do this? All right, so this is for Joe [Callen 00:01:41]. I think this will probably valuable for everybody, kind of give you guys an understanding of what’s worked well for me in terms of local landing pages, from a design perspective or layout perspective if you will.
Joe Troyer: I’ll kind of just give you guys an outline that you guys can go, and that you guys can follow. These elements don’t have to be followed exactly, but this is what has worked really well for me over time. Top left overall needs to be your logo. That should be obvious. Then top right needs to be the phone number. If this is, again, we’re talking about local sites, so if this is a local site truly, and the thing that we want people to do is to make a phone call, then somewhere around this phone number, you should have some type of offer or reason for people to call now.
Joe Troyer: What we’ve done in the past is squeezed the phone number and made it a little bit smaller. Then on the top, and in much smaller text, we’ve made some type of offer. For example, one thing that’s worked really well is call now for 20% off, and having something like this, and it be a very contrasting color to the actual phone number. If the phone number was big and red, we’d do something in green so it would really freaking pop.
Joe Troyer: You can also obviously come up with a much better offer than call now for 20%. If you’re working in the service industry, let’s say working with HVAC, or appliance repair, or things like that, an offer that works really, really well is no service call fee with repair. You get paid the service call fee, or your client does, as long as the customer ends up getting it repaired, so you win either way. You’re getting paid the service call fee, or they’re waving it. They actually get to do business with them past that actual service call.
Joe Troyer: What I’ve done then in the past in the header, and be careful with spacing, it can get a little tricky here, but what I’ve done in the past that’s worked really well in the header is displaying some authority type of symbols, so five stars with Google, five stars with Yelp, five stars with this, five stars with that. Put in something here that’s an authority status. If you’re going to do a slider, or you’re going to have more than one offer, I would put that right here. I know guys, this is the most beautiful freaking mock up you guys have ever seen.
Joe Troyer: Ideally on this slider, if you’re going to use a slider, you need to be thoughtful about the slider. Again, think of this like a chooser. What are the offers for the business? Let’s give a real example here. For a dentist for example, what are some offers that we could have for a dentist? Guys, give me some feedback in the chat. What’s an offer that we could have for a dentist, or that a dentist could have on their site? Okay, we need three of them let’s say. Teeth whitening, yep. One of the offerings that we’ve done well with, with teeth whitening in terms of an entry offer, is free teeth whitening with cleaning. Cleaning cost 100 bucks, or whatever.
Joe Troyer: What’s another offer? Braces. Okay, so if they do something with braces. Be like, “Zero percent financing on braces.” Okay, next one, let’s go with something cosmetic, because cosmetic is big, big, big ticket. Cosmetic is really big ticket. Save 10% on … I know Lumineers, which is I forget the old term. Lumineers are the new teeth covering. I don’t know of a better word that that. Yeah, implant. Yeah, or implant, or something like that. Okay, and then let’s do one more.
Joe Troyer: These are all elective things for the most past. But what’s going to draw the most patients is a free exam, man I couldn’t spell, x-ray and consultation. We used to have a tagline for this that we used. Don’t pay to find out what’s wrong. So as you guys look at this list, what order would you put these in? If it’s a slider, and we got one, two, three, four offers, we’re going to do one offer per slider, what order would you put these in? Give me some feedback in the chat. I want you thinking.
Joe Troyer: Yeah, so most of you guys are getting this started out right. This one should be first. Why, because most people call the dentist when? When do most people call the dentist? Give me some feedback. When do most people call the dentist? When you called the dentist last, why did you call? Was it for an elective procedure, or did you call because something was wrong? Yeah, something was wrong, so this offer is going to get the majority of people.
Joe Troyer: Then next what I would do is probably go to this one, which is probably their highest ticket offer. Then this is a good offer that kind of applies to everybody, so I would probably use this next. This isn’t an exact science folks. Then I would probably use this one last. So when they land on the site, this is what they’re going to see on this big slider is this first offer. Why? Because it portrays to the most people. Let’s see, Caroline says that she would’ve put teeth whitening first versus this one. It could definitely be as well. But definitely, 100%, you’re going to want to put this one first.
Joe Troyer: All right, so next up is this next area right here. This is everything above the fold. The fold is where I got to scroll, so obviously we’re just talking about desktop right now, okay. But what I like to do is I like to separate this area into three boxes, or three separate things. This has changed over time. We’ve been playing with something in this third box that’s new. It’s been working really well. Guys again, you can play with these designs and these elements, but this is the core of what you want above the fold.
Joe Troyer: One right here, again, we want to portray authority. This could be your reviews. This could be listings, and links, and graphics to other authority sites that you guys are on that have your reviews. This could be Better Business logos. It could be secure site. It could talk about SSL. These are just trust things, trust factors, so I would say authority or trust. Two then is something that’s going to talk about why us, or why this company.
Joe Troyer: Last is going to be all about charity or the company’s bigger vision. This is becoming more and more important, this third one. At the end of the day, millennials as a buying segment are getting larger, and larger, and larger obviously. They want to specifically see this third point. If there are three dentists all lined up that are essentially the same, let’s say the third one isn’t even quite as good in terms of reviews but they believe in a charity. They give back to a charity, they have a bigger vision. For every dollar that they get, five percent or one percent even goes back to charity, and here’s what they’re doing. Which dentist is going to win? The one with the charity every single day.
Joe Troyer: I believe that these two things are going to be getting more important and more important over time. The reason for people to choose you, your ethics, your morals, and what you believe it. Then you talking secondly about a charity or a bigger vision beyond just the business itself, I think is getting uber important in today’s day and age. Millennials want to see that. That’s what they believe in. Millennials are spending more money on the internet than anyone else, in way less time too. They’re going to make split decisions very quickly. We need to appeal to them very quickly.
Joe Troyer: This is an overall layout that I would choose, or that I would go by. This site, as you can see, looks nothing like that section. In the above the fold section, we got the name of the company, we got a phone number. There is no offer. There is no easy to see phone number. I mean, it’s in the top right, kind of where it belongs. But it just sticks out like everything else, or it just blends in like everything else.
Joe Troyer: Here are their services. They have a why choose us. It’s just not formatted very well. They have testimonials, it’s just not formatted very well. So I would take a lot of this content. They actually do have a lot of content when you just look through here. What they don’t have is a great, high converting site. So a lot of this stuff can just be repurposed.
Joe Troyer: Next up, let’s take a look at this from an SEO perspective. I like to always just do a page count, see what’s happening with the index too. Supposedly this site has roughly 1300 results. It seems pretty crazy that they would have that many pages. I would assume that … Yeah, so this is an empty page, so this isn’t good. You would want to either get content on this or get rid of it and redirect it to the homepage.
Joe Troyer: This is probably why I would assume that there’s so many pages, because everybody has a notice page I guess. This is a memorial page for each and every person. It talks about links to the obituary, or it gives that here. Maybe this is the obituary. It talks about the service details, so that would make sense. There’s lots of URLs that have slash notices in there.
Joe Troyer: Let’s see if we can get this to work. I haven’t been able to get InURL to work very well lately. All right, here we go. There’s 40 pages that don’t contain slash notices in the URL structure. I must have just been misspelling or not putting it in quite correctly before. 40 pages isn’t bad. That sounds a little bit more normal. It looks like … I don’t see any location pages, so they must only have this one location in San Francisco, so let’s do a search for San Francisco funeral service.
Joe Troyer: Duggan’s Funeral Service, so you’re ranking number one, which is freaking fantastic. Unfortunately, I’m sure that you’re not getting most of the business that’s coming here. So the thing that I would do first and foremost, even before a website audit is this. Three stars, 14 reviews is not good, so you need to get that at least to, I would say a four and a half stars aggregate rating, or average rating. This can be super simple. Send a text message to clients, staff, key relationships, business relationships like vendors. In that message, you’re going to give a cry for help. Then you’re going to give a short link to GMB review page.
Joe Troyer: The cry for help is going to simple. I noticed we have some bad reviews on our Google profile, and I believe it’s really affecting our business. Can you please take a second? I would even say please. Can you take second and leave us a review? It would really help. Then give a short link to the review page. This coming from whoever owns or runs the funeral service, out to some of the memorable clients, staff, vendors, and other business relationships that they have, in 48 hours to 72 hours, this could be turned upside down. It could have a four and a half plus aggregate.
Joe Troyer: Now when somebody is looking at a funeral service in San Francisco from the internet, they’re going to be the go-to. They’re going to have more reviews than everybody else, and they’re going to be four and a half stars. they’re going to get the traffic and the phone calls, instead of everybody else. Okay, so that is going to be the biggie in terms of getting more calls, right here and right now.
