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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!

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!

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.

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.  

Digital Media Trends in 2019

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Well folks, 2019 is slowly winding down and we saw some interesting trends unfold in the world of digital media. Digital ads spending reached an important milestone, social media users shifted the way they view content, and video ad spend continued to favor specific device types. So, let’s dive right in and break down what really happened!

Digital Ads for the Win!

This year marked the first time when digital ad spends surpassed traditional ad spending in the US with an estimated 54.2% of total spending going towards digital. Though revenues continued to grow for digital monsters Google and Facebook, 2019 is the first time digital spends decreased for both. Taking a leap in digital spend was Amazon which was estimated to grow more than 50% this past year in the US market. In traditional ad spend, the biggest two losers were directories (like Yellow Pages) with a 19% decline and print (including newspapers and magazines) with a 17.8% decline in spend.   

Social Network Device Preference

Another trend we saw in 2019 was the device type that social media users accessed their accounts which continued to shift towards mobile devices and away form desktops and laptops. This shift comes as social platforms continued to develop more mobile-friendly features to their apps and as more users tended to use desktops/laptops for school or work purposes. With this trending throughout the years, it’s easy to see why Facebook advertisers spend 94% of their ad budgets on mobile.

Video Ads Making Moves

In 2019, 45.6% of all digital video ads will be placed on mobile devices. This increasing trend continued from past years as advertisers are trying to capitalize on the shift towards mobile usage. Advertisers in the US were expected to spend two-thirds of their digital budgets on mobile ad placements. However, video ads are still the only format where more marketing dollars are spent on channels other than mobile. This is partly due to the OTT ad spend on streaming services such as Hulu and other connected TV sources.

I hope we haven’t weighed you down with too many statistical insights, but it is important for businesses and advertisers to know emerging trends in order to best utilize marketing budgets. Stay tuned for part two of this article when we discuss some forecasts in digital media for 2020!

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.  

Source: eMarketer

Google Bans Elective Medical Ads

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Google recently announced that they will no longer show ads promoting speculative and experimental medical treatments starting on October 1, 2019. The list of treatments banned include stem cell therapy, cellular therapy, gene therapy, platelet rich plasma, bio-hacking, and gene therapy kits. This list appears to encompass any non-FDA approved treatments. Google explains that the main reason for disallowing these types of ads is because these types of treatments are “unproven” and lack significant and formal clinical trials to justify widespread use. They also cite that the use of these treatments can “lead to dangerous outcomes”.

So, what can one do now that they are not able to promote these types of treatments on Google Ads?

First off, we hope that your marketing provider has not recommended a one-sided marketing strategy. You should never rely on just one marketing method. It is important to use a diverse marketing strategy that includes multiple avenues for advertising your services – not just in the medical field, but for all industries. In the digital world, it starts with a great website. This is the foundation. Your website should be visually pleasing, mobile friendly, provide great content, and have specific calls-to-action.

The next step in your digital strategy is how to bring potential patients to your site. If you are solely relying on Google Ads, you may want to rethink your strategy especially if you are only advertising these newly banned treatments. Think about all treatments and procedures your clinic provides. You should consider choosing a few different ones and create Google ads for each type of service. Just like you can’t rely on Google Ads as your sole marketing platform, you shouldn’t rely on just one type of medical treatment to advertise.

Another type of marketing strategy to employ is an organic approach. By writing two to three blog articles per month and adding to your website, you can really improve your search engine optimization (SEO) which helps users to help find your website organically through non-paid methods. Other types of initiatives to consider are Facebook Ads, Display Advertising, Email marketing, or even your own Podcast.

Google’s banning of these specific types of ads doesn’t mean the end of the world for a clinic that practices these specialties. There are many other digital marketing options available. If you or someone you know has a health clinic and need expert advice, please feel free to contact us or call us at 713-309-6380.

Are Your Ads Annoying?

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It’s happened to everyone. You’re scrolling through news article headlines online and you click one that piques your interest. The web browser navigates to the website with said article. You start to read and 3 seconds later, it happens: a video ad pops up, starts playing, and the volume is turned up all the way because you were just listening to your favorite band on Spotify! More than two-thirds of people surveyed regarding internet ads they find annoying would agree that this is in fact, the most annoying type of ad!

By now, you’re saying to yourself, “But my business relies heavily on digital ads. Are my ads annoying people???” We’re here to offer you some peace of mind.

Not all digital ads annoy people.

Digital ads are a cost-effective way to reach your target audience when promoting your goods and services. They also work and provide a great return on investment.

According to a July 2019 study that included both people who utilize an ad blocker application and those that don’t, the following percentage of respondents found different types of digital ads annoying:

  • Video ads that play automatically on websites with sound – 66.7%
  • Video ads that play automatically on websites without sound – 55%
  • Audio ads (on music streaming services or podcasts) – 47.4%
  • Ads that show up based on my online searches – 42.4%

Of the remaining ad types, less than 60% of respondents found digital ads annoying. This includes ads that appear during a web search (search ads) and ads that appear on websites for products of services that they had or hadn’t bought (display ads).

Overall, those that use an ad blocker were more likely to find ALL ad types annoying. This should go without saying. The takeaway is that knowing your customer is extremely important when choosing a digital ad strategy. Some types of ads just don’t appeal to everyone.

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.

Hitting the Brakes on Google Accelerated Ad Delivery

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Who doesn’t want to use their marketing budget to its fullest potential? We all want to reach as many relevant consumers as possible with every ad dollar spent, right? When Google announced it was ending Accelerated Ad Delivery many people’s first thought was, “No problem. I’m using Standard Delivery.  I’m not impacted.” BUT are there potentially unforeseen implications to this change for the CPC ad model and market?  

Accelerated Ad Delivery has front loaded the priority of auction style bidding toward the early part of the day or campaign schedule. This made since for some business models… Like that guy who ran the little lunch joint around the corner, who’s restaurant is too small for family dinners, who needed morning ad performance in order to fill his tables for lunch. Or the lube shop manager who needed to keep the bays full in the morning to ensure he’s profitable every day.

This increased competition in the early hours of the day, which does make since for a few businesses, lead to increased morning CPCs, and a faster overall spend of their ad budget.

Google will switch a multitude of Accelerated Delivery campaigns to Standard Delivery in October.  Standard Delivery is a much more prevalent strategy for bidding for relevant ad space, and it aims to evenly spend an ad budget throughout the day. This typically returns a more efficient overall CPC and uses marketers’ budgets to their fullest potential.

That improved overall ROI for most campaigns would be a win, right?  That is exactly why Google is hitting the brakes on Accelerated Ad Delivery at the end of this month (Oct. 1st). It’s a trade of morning priority for overall effectiveness.

Google warns that the change from Accelerated delivery to Standard delivery may result in an underspend of your budget if you were previously using Accelerated Delivery. But, consider what happens to the number of bids throughout the rest of the day. If Google takes the “morning rush” and spreads it throughout the day, will that be a significant amount of bid pressure? Will Advertisers be impacted by this leading to higher average CPCs across the entire day?

Google is the Goliath in the CPC bidding, and swinging even a small portion of their customers into another delivery strategy could carry significant weight and affect ROI for the larger portion of advertisers and marketers bidding for ad space every day. Could this little change, this removal of a customer option for the improvement of their own ROI, ultimately result in decreased ROI and effectiveness for most of the campaigns that were already running standard delivery ads?

Only time, and analytics reporting will tell… Maybe, I’m right and forward thinking, or maybe I’m just a little paranoid because I’m always looking out for my customers’ ad dollars like they’re my own… If you are looking for advice on how to best set up your Google campaign for optimal performance, contact Brand Ranch Media, and we will treat your ad dollars just as we would our own.

Source: https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/2404248?hl=en

IP vs. Cookie Based Targeting Methods: Pros & Cons

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Targeting and communicating with your best consumers digitally is essential to achieving many companies’ goals.  The tools and techniques available to identify relevant consumers are continuously becoming more refined.  Which targeting strategy is the right one to maximize your campaign’s effectiveness and minimize waste? Well, that deserves some serious thought, and maybe a conversation about your goals and target consumers.

Let’s start with some pros and cons for two commonly used digital targeting tools; IP based, and Cookie based targeting…. 

IP based targeting is based on the idea that each online device has an IP address, which is in turn tied to a physical location…

There are some pros and cons with this type of location-based targeting:

Pros:

  • If you know a user’s location, you can also cross reference lots of other data about them and refine your targeting…
    • Personal information becomes available…
      • Things like Household Income
      • Children in the home
      • Education levels

There is a multitude of consumer demographic data available based on physical location in most developed countries. This compilation of data allows marketers to customize ads to consumers based on that available data, which can be used for both online & offline media and communication.

Cons:    

  • Physical locations often have more than one device, and each device can have more than one user, and multiple users often can’t be separately identified through IP address alone
  • Offices often share one IP address for all company devices…
    • These devices may also route through a corporate IT central hub, which may be in a completely different city or country.
  • User data may be encrypted or shielded for a “wee bit of anonymity,” but with enough attention to detail and additional data sources, there are valid concerns for individual privacy.

Cookies… you’ve probably seen those little notifications and consent forms pop up on your phone or device informing you that a site uses cookies… but how exactly do we use them? Well there are many types of cookies, with different functions, but they are basically lines of code to collect user data from an online device.

Pros:

  • Cookies functionally improve the online experience for consumers in many ways.
    • They help recognize users from site visit to visit
    • They store user form fill data
    • They keep track of what you put in your shopping carts
    • They personalize offers which can be beneficial too, as those abandoned items in your cart often come back to you with a discount. 😉
  • The data collected by cookies can be used to categorize a user and their interests for behavioral targeting, which allows more relevant ads and content and an improved overall online experience.
  • Knowing consumers’ historical interests, and the timing of those interests, can drive efficiency in digital ad targeting and lead to a higher return on each marketing dollar spent.

Cons:

  • The data starts as device specific, and multiple users on family computers or devices may share cookie data. Which may muddy the water on a user’s interests and behavior and lead to irrelevant content and offers.
  • Cookies expire, or can be cleaned out based on user preferences and settings, which may eliminate relevant, actionable targeting data
  • Some cookies slow page load times and reduce the quality of a web experience
  • Again, there are concerns for user privacy (hence the request for consent to cookie use appearing on many sites you use and visit)

Given the right circumstances, both of these targeting strategies can greatly improve the performance of a marketing campaign. Properly executed, both tactics can help you to reach or exceed your campaign goals. The real key is in the art of knowing when and how to use them. If you would like to talk strategy or need help ensuring you are reaching and influencing your target consumers effectively, on the right devices, at the right time, with the right message… please contact Brand Ranch Media and we can ensure you’re using the correct strategy to get the best return on your marketing investment.

  1. https://www.herosmyth.com/article/who-took-cookie-science-behind-targeted-advertising
  2. https://www.vicimediainc.com/ip-targeting-direct-mail-internet/
  3. https://ppcmasterminds.com/b/cookie-based-vs-ip-based-remarketing-methods/
  4. https://www.signal.co/blog/cookie-based-marketing-not-relevant-impactful/