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Local SEO for HVAC

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Local SEO for HVAC

In part 4 of our series on marketing for HVAC companies we are going to look in to how an effective local search strategy can vastly improve the online visibility against competitors. Local SEO, also known as Local Search, is simply defined as a way to optimize your website to rank better for a local audience. This is very important for HVAC companies that operate within a local service area. There are a few ways that you can boost local search rankings. Let’s take a look!

Google My Business

In a previous article, we talked about Google My Business listing optimization. If you are not aware, Google My Business is an application where users can create a business listing on Google that helps manage their online presence.  Your business profile lets you connect with customers across both Google Search and Google Maps. Your Google My Business listing represents 25% of Google Map ranking factors meaning if you don’t have a strong listing, you are less likely to appear on Google Maps during searches. Your Google My Business listing has also become the new “home page” of your website in that when a user searches for your business by name, your Google My Business listing SHOULD appear in the search results page and take up the majority of the page real estate showing multiple points of company information including location, phone number, and email address. This means that a potential customer won’t even need to click the organic link to your website in order to find the most important thing about your business: how to contact you. 

Reviews

A positive review is one of the most important factors when potential customers are trying to make a purchasing decision, so much so that Google and other search engines utilize online reviews as ranking factors. If you search for “hvac company near me” the top results almost always include those with the greatest number of 5-star reviews. It will also help a business appear in the top of Google Map results. The reason that search engines use reviews as a ranking factor is that they want to provide people with the best quality results, so they take good and bad reviews very seriously. Read our past article if you want to learn more about how to get great Google reviews.

Website Content Signals

Any local SEO plan should include website work as there are certain content signals that are important for local search rankings. Content signals should include the location that you are trying to rank for. For example, if your business services the Houston, Texas area, content on your website should include “Houston, Texas”. Location signals should be placed not only within the copy of the site but in various meta data such as page titles and descriptions, image alt tags, and structured snippets. You should also consider writing location-based blog entries and promote through social media.

There are other aspects to local search to consider when deciding to move forward with a full campaign. If you or someone you know needs help with local SEO, contact us or give us a call at 713-309-6380. Brand Ranch Media is a full-service advertising agency. We would love to help you achieve all marketing goals!

Facebook Marketing for HVAC

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Facebook Marketing for HVAC Companies

We are moving along to Part 3 of our blog series on HVAC marketing where we will discuss advertising on social media, specifically Facebook. You may ask yourself, “Is there any benefit to marketing on Facebook?” The short answer is, “Yes!”

Types of Ads

Facebook Ads is a very diverse marketing platform and can help a company grow their followers, promote engagement with content, boost branding, and drive inquiries and sales. You can promote your business utilizing text, images, and video content. There are multiple ad placement locations including the news feed on desktop and mobile devices, within Facebook Messenger, and on Instagram, just to name a few. It is important to utilize different ad strategies to fill the sales funnel and nurture leads.

Measuring Ad Success

Depending on the goal of each ad, it is best to properly measure ad success. Facebook Ads has built-in success tracking that will help you gauge the effectiveness of the ad. For example, if ABC AC and Heating Co. are running an ad designed to increase the number of leads they receive through online form fills, they would want to set up a custom conversion in Facebook that will tell them exactly how many form fills were received as a result of their campaign. Facebook provides the ability to do this through their marketing platform with a seamless integration.

Targeting Your Audience

Just like Google Ads, Facebook Ads offer many different targeting methods that enable your campaigns to reach the most captivated audience. You can target different demographics such as age, gender, household income, and location. If you upload a list of your customers, you can create campaigns designed to upsell or promote services specifically to your customers. To broaden your ad’s reach, creating a customer lookalike audience is a great practice. You may want to retarget visitors to your website or people who have engaged with your Facebook page and content in order to promote audience-specific services.

What is a Healthy Budget?

Facebook Ads tend to be much less expensive than Google Ads and other types of marketing campaigns. The cost for conversions tends to be up to 75% less than Google. For a healthy budget on Facebook it’s fair to say that spending between $1,000 to $2,000 per month will get solid results – depending on the number of campaigns and your specific goals. This budget also contributes to organic traffic to the website. It is typical to see an increase in organic traffic and well as organic leads with the addition of Facebook ad campaigns. With diligent conversion tracking, it is easy to show a positive return on investment.

Keep up with us for Part 4 of this blog series when we discuss Local SEO. For more information on our HVAC marketing services, contact us or give us a call at 713-309-6380. Brand Ranch Media is a full-service advertising agency. We would love to help you achieve all your marketing goals!

PPC Marketing for HVAC

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In Part 1 of our blog series on HVAC marketing, we discussed some of the basic foundations of running successful marketing campaigns in the A/C and heating industry. Today we will go a bit further into detail and talk about some of the key elements of a pay-per-click marketing campaign on search engines such as Google. Utilizing the Google Ads marketing platform is a great way to reach potential customers while they are actively searching for A/C and heating services. Capturing their attention at the exact time they are searching is more likely to lead to a conversion such as a phone call or form fill.

How Does it Work?

Pay-per-click (or PPC) campaigns are an excellent way to reach customers that normally might not find you on the internet based on targeting specific keywords during searches as well as utilizing geo-targeting to attract more customers located in specific areas. For example, a consumer located in Houston, Texas is looking for a company that can fix their broken air conditioner in their home. They go online to Google and search “AC repair” hoping to find a company that can send a technician to fix the broken unit. Utilizing Google Ads as well as a good targeting strategy, an advertisement for ABC Air and Heating Company appears. The customer clicks the ad and then calls ABC Air to schedule a service appointment. ABC Air is charged a fee from Google when the customer clicked their ad, but that cost is minimal compared to the return on their investment to obtain a new customer.

Specifics on Targeting

PPC marketing provides multiple tools to help narrow down the audience for ads that will help drive business. Consumers can be targeted based on age, gender, income, location, and online shopping behavior just to name a few. Consumers can also be retargeted so that they are served your specific ad multiple times to further encourage them to become a customer. If the conversion goal is a phone call or a form fill, you are able to target those consumers who are more likely to convert.

What is a Healthy Budget?

If you have decided that a pay-per-click campaign might be something you want to explore, it is important to understand the costs associated with it. The cost for a click depends on a few factors such as the amount you are willing to pay for a click for the keyword, the number of companies bidding on the specific keyword, the relevancy of the ad copy to the keyword, and the relevancy of the landing page content on your website to the keyword. Back to the example: since ABC Air is located in Houston, it is safe to say that there are many other AC companies in town bidding on the keyword “AC repair”. Houston is a hot climate and therefore many other companies are trying to gain the competitive advantage. Since the competition is so high, average cost-per-clicks are more expensive. If your budget is too low, you won’t be able to compete. During non-peak season months, a healthy budget is anywhere between $4000 and $5000 per month. When the hotter months arrive, doubling that monthly budget is very realistic. The return on the investment is well worth it. In some cases, we have seen almost 100% growth in revenue after the first year of implementing a PPC marketing strategy!

Keep up with us for Part 3 of this blog series when we discuss Facebook marketing. For more information on our HVAC marketing services, contact us or give us a call at 713-309-6380. Brand Ranch Media is a full-service advertising agency. We would love to help you achieve all your marketing goals!

Proven HVAC Marketing Strategies

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Calling all Heating and Air Conditioning providers! If you’re an HVAC company, you likely do some form of advertising. In such a competitive market, if you are not doing some form of traditional or digital advertising, you are likely losing business to your competitors. Whether it be television or radio, PPC, Social Media (such as Facebook), or Local SEO, Brand Ranch Media has proven HVAC marketing strategies that we’d like to share in a multi-part blog series.

HVAC Marketing Competition

If you perform a simple Google search for “ac repair”, you may see up to 8 ads from various HVAC providers on the first page alone depending on your location. If you click to the second page, you might see another 8 ads from completely different HVAC companies. During the hotter months of the year, you will probably begin to see television commercials or hear radio advertisements for HVAC services and new unit offers. The competition is heavy year-round and especially during the Summer months. In order to increase sales numbers year over year, an HVAC company can’t afford NOT to advertise!

Traditional vs. Digital Marketing

Can’t decide whether to run traditional campaigns such as TV and radio or digital campaigns such as PPC or Social Media? The answer depends on a few different factors. The first is conversion tracking. It is very difficult to track the number of leads received from television and radio campaigns. The most effective way of doing this is by utilizing a tracking phone number or custom landing page URL in the commercials. Other than those tracking methods, it is difficult to establish ROI. On the other hand, it is much easier to track performance and prove ROI with digital campaigns. The second factor to consider is budget. For HVAC companies with smaller budgets, we typically recommend the digital route. Digital campaigns are much more cost effective as you can reach more people with less budget and you can track the results. With larger budgets, we recommend a more robust and rounded strategy that includes digital, video, television, OTT/CTV and radio.

When Do I Start?

To answer the question of when to start HVAC campaigns consider the climate, your budget, and the calendar. In a warmer climate, if it’s approaching the start of a new calendar year and the budget is more robust, we recommend starting at the first of the year with a smaller monthly budget and slowly increase the monthly spend so that during the hottest months, you are maximizing the total reach of the campaigns. Once the weather starts to cool, we then recommend a lower monthly spend until the end of the year. If the budget is a bit lower, we might recommend spending all of it during the hottest months of the year in order to compete in the market. No matter the company’s service area or budget, every recommendation is customized in order to ensure optimal performance.

Stay tuned for upcoming articles where we discuss topics specifically related to the HVAC industry for Pay-Per-Click marketing, Social Media and Facebook marketing, Local SEO, and Television and Radio advertising.

For more information on our HVAC marketing services, contact us or give us a call at 713-309-6380. Brand Ranch Media is a full-service advertising agency. We would love to help you achieve all your marketing goals!

What Can Online Reviews Do for You

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In August of 2019, we wrote a blog, Google Reviews: How to Get More and Why They are Important in which we addressed, you guessed it, how to get more reviews on Google and why it’s important for your business. We focused on Google, but you can apply the concepts to any review platforms such as Facebook, Yelp, and Amazon just to name a few. The bottom line is no matter what type of industry you are in, reviews can make or break your business. In most cases, they are the difference in whether a customer will even consider buying from you. c

The Good

Everyone wants good reviews, but they don’t just come automatically. A customer who is angry is two to three times more likely to write a bad review than a customer who had a great experience. Because of this, it is important to nurture good reviews. To do this, you must know when a customer is having a good experience (it should be most of them) and simply ask for a positive review and let them know where they can write one, i.e. Google, Facebook, Yelp, etc. Once you receive a review, take the short amount of time to write a friendly response directly on the review platform. This adds a personal touch that customers love.

The Bad

A bad review is inevitable. At some point, they are going to happen. This is when you must step up your reputation management game. It can take 12 positive reviews to cancel out a negative one. The first step is damage control. You must reach out to the customer either through the review platform or direct contact. Listen to their concerns, see if you can come to a mutual resolution, and kindly ask if they would please revise their review. The worst-case scenario is that they won’t revise their review and then you will need to continue to ask other customers for some great, 5-star reviews. This could be you, your staff, or even your friends and family. Hopefully, you will always get great reviews and won’t have to worry about the bad!

The Ugly

Sometimes, there is that one person who decides that they want to ruin someone’s day, life, career, or whatever it may be! They have a personal vendetta against someone. They’re mad and they want everyone to know it! They take to the internet (with clearly too much time on their hands) and do anything they can to bash the reputation of a business or even an employee of that business. We call these “Internet Trolls”. Here’s an example:

“John Doe, who works for your company, made fun of me in high school for an ugly haircut. I just thought you should know the quality of the character of your employee. I give your company 1 star!”

We have seen this happen before. The review is not relevant in any way to the services you offer. John Doe might have been a jerk in high school but that’s not going to ruin your business and you don’t need to fire him just to please the angry troll. In these cases, you can appeal the review directly to the review platform admins. In most cases, they will take it down. The second step is that you might need to block this person from access to leaving reviews which may also involve contacting the platform admins. Problem solved!

If you or someone you know needs help with collecting reviews and review management, contact us or give us a call at 713-309-6380. Brand Ranch Media is a full-service advertising agency. We would love to help you achieve all your marketing goals!

Does Your Google Analytics Have A Glitch?

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Having accurate data is the most important asset when analyzing the effectiveness of marketing campaigns. When making data-driven decisions, you must ensure that they are based on what really occurred. When data doesn’t match between different management platforms, you could spend a great deal of time trying to figure out what went wrong. Today, we will discuss some common data discrepancy issues related to Google Analytics and some solutions to help avoid them.

A recently written article addressed a disparity of data in Google Analytics and a 3rd party system that was tracking demo requests for their product. This company created an event in Analytics as well as a Google Sheet where the demo requests were stored. They noticed that there was a significantly higher number of demo requests recorded on their Google Sheet vs. the number of events in Analytics. The article goes on to suggest that a possible cause of the discrepancy could be the use of ad blockers. Ad blockers don’t just block ads, but they also will block anything that tracks a user, such as cookies, including Google Analytics. In this case, user events with ad blockers were not being recorded in Analytics, but they were able to collect the accurate data with their 3rd party system. At Brand Ranch Media, we suggest finding and using 3rd party software the seamlessly integrates with Analytics. We utilize the call tracking software, CallRail, that has an integration built specifically for Google Analytics so that we can track phone calls for various campaigns.

Another common data discrepancy that can occur is inflation in the Analytics Traffic report. This report displays user data for different traffic sources such as organic, paid, referral, etc. Traffic inflation can occur when spam and other type of bot activity is recorded in this dataset. It is not uncommon to see thousands of visits each month from spam and bots. This causes a huge headache when trying to report accurate numbers. Luckily, there is a way to block all known spiders and bot traffic through the Analytics Admin section. Navigate to the View Settings and scroll to the bottom where you can check a box to exclude all known bots and spiders.

If you are running a Google Ads campaign and the data in the ads manager platform does not match data in Analytics, there could be an issue with URL tagging. By default, a Google Ads account is setup with manual tagging enabled. If you don’t manually tag every potential final URL, you could end up with huge data discrepancies in Analytics and Google Ads. To avoid this, the ads platform has an auto-tag setting that you can select when linking Google Ads to an Analytics property. The benefits to auto-tagging is that you avoid potential human error by telling the system to tag every final URL automatically. It will import goals and transactions from Analytics to Google Ads conversion tracking. You will also receive more detailed analytics in your account.

Having an experience team to guide you through all of the data from marketing campaigns is important to the overall success of those campaigns. If you want to learn more, please feel free to contact us or call 713-309-6380 to speak directly with an expert.

Holiday Marketing Trends

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We are in the heat of the holiday season (pun intended) and as shoppers frantically run to the stores or shop online, retailers hope that their holiday marketing plans will be a success. If you happen to be a retailer and feel as though your efforts fell short in 2019, we have some tips and trends to consider for next year’s holiday shopping season.

The Early Bird Gets the Worm

Taking a look at Google Trends, searches for holiday gift ideas started to spike as early as late October. One assumption could be made that as soon as the Fall holiday events begin (starting with Halloween), consumers get bit by the holiday bug and start thinking about gifts for their family and friends. Setting up holiday ad campaigns early can help you stand out above your competitors. It’s also a good idea to create a sense of urgency utilizing limited time offers as well as flash sales that offer large discounts over a short amount of time.

I Didn’t Come All This Way for a Bad Time

If you are driving customers to your website, you want to be sure that when they get there, they have a good user experience. With more and more web traffic coming from mobile devices, users are much less patient with sites that don’t load quickly and are hard to navigate. You cannot afford to have a poor user experience on either desktop or mobile devices. A bad experience can lead to less customers driving down holiday earnings for your business.

Don’t Just Sit Back and Relax

It’s relatively simple to choose ad copy/creative and drive traffic to a website utilizing proper audience targeting, but how can you stand out above the competition in the modern day? Facebook provides messaging ads that help bridge the gap between ad, website, and purchase. Utilizing the Facebook Messenger platform, customers can click an ad that will open a dialogue directly with the business. This is a very strong form of lead nurturing and can be exponentially beneficial for retailers that take advantage of this platform.

Pile into the Car, We’re Going Shopping

Nothing beats the good, old fashioned holiday shopping grind. Businesses are finding that customers still love going to the store to pick out their items. Whether it be for items that people want to physically touch (such as clothing) or experience for themselves (such as furniture), shopping in-store is still relevant. Digital marketing platforms can help to drive more engagement by capturing consumers during the decision-making process. When it comes to making a final decision, many consumers will make the trip to the brick-and-mortar location to make that purchase and have the gift already in hand.

Brand Ranch Media helps retail clients design and implement successful marketing campaigns. We know this holiday season is coming to and end, but if you need help with your marketing plans for 2020 please feel free to contact us or call 713-309-6380.

Google Political Ad Policy

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In the wake of the recent elections in the U.K. and upcoming US elections in 2020, Google announced that they are making some updates to their political ads policy. The changes reflect Google’s intent to provide the most relevant information, specifically pertaining to elections and candidates. Let’s take a dive into how some of these policy updates will affect the paid ads that we see this election season.

First off, we should mention that these updates are in no way designed to favor any one political party but rather are intended to eliminate what Google calls “deep fakes,” misleading claims about the census, or ads and website destinations that clearly provide false information, potentially causing distrust in the voting process. Essentially, Google wants to ensure they are not providing false and misleading content on their platform which is what they strive to do in their search algorithm.

Political advertisers are still able to utilize the different ad formats: Search, Display, and YouTube. The updates, however, will eliminate targeting based on public voter records and political affiliations. Instead, they will allow targeting by age, gender, and postal code locations. Advertisers will also be able to target contextually which will allow them to target specific issues. Google’s goal here is to better align with other sources of traditional media like TV, radio, and print. They also want ads to target more of the masses so it can generate public dialogue.

Finally, Google wants to be more transparent in the way they provide political ad information. They are going to provide “transparency reports” that will provide the public with information such as who paid for the ad, the content of the ad, how many people saw the ad and so forth. They are also going to include state-level election data in these reports and include all ads in their search results network.

If you or someone you know would like to discuss your political digital ad strategy, please feel free to contact us or call us at 713-309-6380.  

SEO Trends for 2020

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Search Engine Optimization. SEO. Google Algorithm. Core Updates.

These are phrases we often hear when talking about websites and how they rank on search engine results pages (SERPs). Does anyone (other than the folks at Google who write the algorithms) really understand how algorithm updates are going to positively or negatively affect every individual website that exists? Probably not. Considering that Google announced they roll out about 500-600 algorithm updates each year, it would be a boisterous claim! There are, however, studies and SEO practices performed that help identify what works and what doesn’t. As 2020 soon approaches, we look into the future and what we think is important to consider for your SEO campaign.

Mobile Friendly is Our Friend

First and foremost, if you do not have a mobile friendly website, why bother? Not only does Google look for this as a ranking factor but it is important for the end user as well. In some cases, we saw 60 – 70% of all website traffic in 2019 come from a mobile device. This is crucial functionality for a website and if you don’t have it, you’re not even a player.

Website Content for You and Me

When writing content, it is important to think about the search intent of a user. What are they looking for? Are they looking for general information or looking into services related to their search query? If you are not thinking about the content from a user’s point of view, then you might consider re-thinking your content strategy. Consider the user, and not the search engine, when writing content. One terrible SEO practice is adding keyword phrases on a page for the purpose of trying to rank for that phrase. Most of the time, these phrases make no sense to the reader and have poor readability.

Shoot a Video

Video content is starting to be more effective at providing key information and helping to increase leads. The average user today would much rather watch video content than read. This is one reason why YouTube has gained in popularity over a short period of time. Videos also rank much faster than textual content. Placing your videos on a branded YouTube channel and embedding them onto your website is a big win.

Do You Even Convert, Bro?

You can drive all the traffic you want to your website, but at the end of the day, how many visitors are converting to customers? There are a few things that help consumers make choices such as reviews, case studies, and simply explaining how your company is different/better than the competition. Place strong calls-to-action and make it easy for them to contact you via contact form, email, or phone. Utilize conversion tracking on your website and link it to your Google Analytics to see where your conversions originate.

These are some very basic concepts of SEO that one could perform on their own site if they have the time and know how to operate their website’s CMS. We suggest you also keep up to date with any changes to Google’s Algorithm. There are many other more advanced SEO concepts that are best to utilize on your website. If you find yourself needing some help, we are always here!

If you or someone you know would like to discuss your digital ad strategy, please feel free to contact us or call us at 713-309-6380.  

Digital Marketing Forecasts for 2020

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In our last post, we pointed out some Digital Marketing trends that we saw in 2019. We continued to see increases in overall digital spending and with digital platforms changing the way companies advertise, we should expect to see new innovations (as well as continued old strategies) in digital marketing in 2020 and beyond. So, let’s get right into it!

SERP Position Zero

Remember when everyone was trying to get to position one in search engine results? There’s a new ranking that everyone will be vying for coming out of Google headquarters and it’s called “position zero”. You have probably already seen examples of position zero on SERPs (hint: it’s the one with an automated snippet that shows an exact answer to your query). According to new data, 61.8 percent of search results in Google are zero-search results. These will appear above any paid ads as well. You can be certain that this will be the ultimate goal for SEO moving forward.

Voice Search Optimization

Do you ever ask Siri, Alexa, or Google Home a question? You’re not alone. Google says that 20 percent of their search queries take place through voice search. Another report points out that 71 percent of mobile users ages 18 through 29 use voice assistants on their smartphones. Large enterprise companies have already started in the voice optimization game but it’s not time for smaller companies to make their content conversational.

Video Content

We are still waiting on the numbers from 2019 but in 2018, YouTube ad revenue increased by 11 percent. This has become an ever-increasingly popular way to deliver ad content and should continue to do so through 2020. Another way that brands can reach their followers is through Facebook Live or Instagram Live. On average, live videos keep the audience watching 3 times longer than recorded videos. Live video should definitely be considered by brands moving into 2020.

Social: Shoppable Posts

If you have a social media account such as Facebook or Instagram, chances are that you have seen ads that allow you to shop for products. You may be surprised to know that 72% of Instagram users have purchased a product through the app. Facebook (who also owns Instagram) has changed their ads platform tremendously in favor of e-commerce stores offering them more ways to sell their products directly from ads. Do not expect to see this trend die out anytime soon. If fact, it will probably increase.

Even More Chatbots

In an effort to interact with online shoppers while they are actively looking at products, brands have looked to chatbots. As chatbots become more sophisticated, it is expected that retailers will cut costs by $439 billion a year and increase sales by $112 billion by 2023. Smaller businesses can utilize automated chatbots as well to help turn an average website visitor into a potential lead.

If you or someone you know would like to discuss your digital ad strategy, please feel free to contact us or call us at 713-309-6380.