How Do You Stack Up Against Your Competitors? Do A Search And See!
Pretend you are a person who needs a plumber, for example. Now you, the plumber, can see what your customer sees. The best-case scenario is that you appear among the top 10 “organic” results in a Google search. But whether you do or not, it’s important to take a look at the competitive landscape. You’ll see some of your competitors, and you’ll see “directories” that you’ve probably heard of or who have called on you to participate in their program. Here’s how to understand what you find.
Transcript:
Good afternoon Michael Byrd here again from Home Services Digital this is video number seven in our series, the endless series of videos about search marketing all of which point of which is to get you educated to know what this all is and to get your phone to ring. You can do some of this yourself you can at least hire it done in an intelligent way you can be not intimidated by it. Search okay when somebody searches for what you do and we’re going to we’re going to give the example again of plumbers we’ve talked about the game of king of the hill we’ve talked about the three sections of a google search window, now we’re going to look at that first ten organic results and we’ll just call this scanning the ten. There are some things that I want you to think about we’re going to actually walk through this and I’m going to attempt to do a picture-in-picture video here so one second I’m going to switch over to the screen and it’s going to become part of video and maybe there’s going to be an effect where my head shrinks down we’ll just. See okay here we go all right now what we’re doing is we’re recording the screen and what I want to do is do the search and let me just take this one out you’re going to come back to that we’re in Wilmington North Carolina but this this will work anywhere this is Wilmington is a good-sized metropolitan area not huge is certainly not Atlanta or Raleigh. So I do the search upcoming plumbers Wilmington North Carolina if I didn’t put Wilmington North Carolina in there it would still give them give me essentially the same results because like I said I’ve said in previous videos Google knows where I am, and those where you are. Okay so plumbers Wilmington North Carolina we’re going to skip these ads up here notice it says add and there’s some a little arrow and that says add we’re going to skip these we’re going to skip the maps for now we’re to come back. I’m going to look at what we see we’re going to just lay this out for you so that it’s not confusing, there are essentially two kinds of things you’ll see here one is what we have right here a directory eight best plumbers a directory homeadvisor.com is a directory. We’re going to talk a lot about directories but for now I just want to go through the overview, here we have a plumb and if you’re not Benjamin Franklin Plumbing this is your competitor. So this is one of the people on the hill that you want to replace or get next to you want to get on the hill with this person you certainly don’t mind bumping this directory out of the way. Here’s another competitor and one little side note here you notice how this headline is way shorter than this one this person is doing a good job getting on page one parley your plumbing and that is how they pronounce it even though it comes from the French Parlier plumbing but what they’re not doing is they’re not making use of their headline they got a bunch of more words they could put in over here it might entice you to click this one as opposed to this one now we have a third plumber Buddy Mintz plumbing and you have maybe a related plumber but this is the different one J.S. Mintz Plumbing may be so forming family maybe it’s a plumbing company that’s split who knows I don’t know. Now we have Angie’s lives Angie’s List is a is your quiz just set it a few minutes ago it’s a directory it is a directory website here’s another listing of plumbers and we’re going to talk more about that in other videos. Here is yellow book well what is that a Yellow Pages knockoff yellow book okay another directory WilmingtonLelandplumbing.com and you see you see the URL the web address here is their headliner. They’re their title tag Keith’s club East Coast Plumbing and Drain Wilmington Leland NC plumbers C they are putting some words in their plumbing drain eastcoast it’s more more stuff to get you to click them versus anything else on the page. 10 best plumbing services in Wilmington that is a directory of course directory; plumbing jobs Wilmington plumbing jobs employing that is not a directory but it’s not a directory of plumbers or well it’s a directory of plumbing jobs. Now what I want you to see here is that remember your in this case in this example you are a person who needs a plumber even though you may be a plumber, your person who needs a plumber and you need a plumber do you want to look in another list this thing that we’re looking at right here this entire Google page is a list. And so what you want to do now you put your plumber hat back on, what you want to do is you want to be here you don’t want to be you don’t want to rely on another click you want to be in this first list you want to be one of the five that happens to be in here. Now one other thing I want to show you if I do it quickly in this video is I went to a community near here which is Southport on a smaller community I did the search this way and what I see let me make sure I did that what I see here is go back down to the ten way more directories. You have way less competition you have fewer plumbers for one thing and you probably have fewer that are sophisticated enough to get themselves on this page within its first five listings maybe the first six our directories one two three home advisor Yellow Pages, Angie’s List, yellow book, Yelp. One two three four five porch that’s six porch that seven South four times that’s a newspaper John’s plumbing company they list one but that’s Manta that’s a directory all the way down to the very last listing Cape Fear plumber. That’s an actual so smaller communities it’s easier you have less competition less sophisticated competition so that’s what I’d like you to do type in the common sense search in your in your profession. In your larger community and then go to a smaller community and just see the difference and look at the number of real competition versus directories are smaller competition in a way sometimes you want to be you might be tempted to be a part of them I would advocate against it but there you go that is the lay of the land check out the ten thanks for watching.
