1. AdWords
2. Using Geo Terms On Your Pages
3. Email Marketing
4. Optimizing Your GMB
5. Local Association InBound Links
6. Call Tracking

We have compiled the best online marketing strategies to implement for your restoration company’s marketing strategy today. All of these strategies are easy to an intermediate skill level of implementation and can provide a quick return to your bottom line. Let’s jump into them.

1. Using AdWords as part of your marketing mix.

I recently attending a search marketing conference and one of the topics, of course, was changes to the Google search platform. The fact is Google keeps added more ad spots at the top of the search, and keeps creating new products to sell in advertising (shopping, physical addresses, etc).

The image below shows how much the ad itself has grown and taken up more space on the page over the years.  

What is the result of this? Lower organic click-through rates (CTR) on both desktop and mobile, the desktop is down 25% and mobile is down 55% only from 2015! This trend is showing you that the Google search is becoming more and more of a pay to play place.

This is why it’s important Google AdWords is part of your marketing strategy. By using Google AdWords you can leverage the top of the search results for only the terms that are important to your business.

Benefits of Google AdWords:

• Top of search results
• Only target keywords that are important for you
• Only target geographic areas you service
• You can generate traffic for keywords you don’t rank organically for
• Target type of people - homeowners, or wealthy people in a geographic location
• Create remarketing campaigns for people who have visited your website or expressed interest in restoration services
• Create call only ads - to guarantee you’re only paying for a phone call to your business

When setting up your campaigns, you will want to make sure you have very specific ad groups, pointing to specific landing pages and an extensive negative keyword list. Too many times we see restoration companies losing money by showing up for keywords like ‘iPhone water damage’ or ‘water damage vehicle’. This is probably on the more intermediate to advanced level of tactics to implement from this list.

2. Using Geo terms on your pages

This is relatively easy, the goal here is to add locations (that your company services) in your header tags (H1, H2) and your URL, and the body of the content. This slide from the recent search marketing conference presentation I attended says it all.

While this presenter is focused only on car dealership marketing, the same applies to local restoration companies - ‘geo term optimization absolutely slays’. It’s nearly impossible to rank organically for every city/town you can service. The strategy and goal here are to create several internal pages that address each location and each keyword/service in that location.

For example, your primary market might be Boston, MA. But if you want to rank for the small towns outside of Boston, you will have to create more internal pages to send the appropriate signals to Google. Such as a page where you are targeting Beverly, MA, outside of Boston would have an URL that looks like - www.company.com/water-damage-beverly-ma. Your H1, images, and body of content will all refer to Beverly, MA, and nothing about Boston and maybe even a link from your page to the tourism/city of Beverly, MA page.

3. Email Marketing

One of the most underutilized and cost-effective marketing tools available to marketers is email marketing. Most restoration companies don’t even have an email list set up with an email software company even though they have a treasure trove of data in their job management software. Did you know MailChimp (one of the easiest email tools) allows you to send up to

2,000 emails for free, forever! This is also one of the easiest tactics to implement, if you need any assistance you can simply look on Youtube for a quick intro/set up video to give you the step by step instructions.

Email marketing will allow you to reach the people you are marketing to (if you have a salesperson), people you have done work for (previous customers), and insurance contacts you engage with on a regular basis. All with a click of a button, you can send a compelling message to thousands of people. Email is like your little secret worker, who is working when you are not. Want to send a series of intro emails and blogs to a person who just signed up on your website without doing anything, you can do that.

Sending emails is also great for getting people to register for insurance continuing education classes, social events, training classes, tips for homeowners, company events and so much more. Compared to all other advertising costs email marketing is the most cost-effective.

Separate your brand by sending a consistent, professionally looking newsletter to stay top of mind in your market.

4. Optimizing Your GMB

GMB stands for Google My Business. We all care so much what Google has to say, so why isn’t everyone keeping up with all the changes Google has added to GMB? This is your knowledge panel and how you come up in the map pack section in a search.

For example, are you utilizing the questions section to create an FAQ section right on Google before anyone visits your site? Or how about the post feature, you can post ANYTHING you want, self-promotion is fine and shows up right in your company’s knowledge panel.

This is FREE real estate on Google, and easy to set up. You can put post up events or even promotions, a good idea for anyone who does carpet or rug cleaning, put up a free promo on Google.

How about an entire menu of services? Yes, now available to the restoration market…for free again. People are converting less and less into websites these days, give them more information before they even decide to visit your site, good chance they'll call you directly from your GMB listing. Here is an example from a screenshot.

Lastly, want to come up more in the map section at the top of the search results more often? The GMB company title is keyword sensitive, so if you add in your location with your company name, when someone searches for a service + location you have a greater chance of showing up (secret nugget there for you). For example, your company name is - Restoration Company. You service the Boston Area. Put in your GMB listing that your name is - Restoration Company Boston MA. Now when someone searches for 'Water Damage Boston MA' you have a greater chance to show up.

5. Local Association InBound Links

Having a website online is similar to starting a business in the sense that you can’t simply buy a domain, pop up a website and expect to start receiving traffic immediately. You have to let Google know who you are, become a trusted source and authority in both your industry and local geographic area. Just like a business, people aren’t going to immediately start buying from you just because you opened up a shop downtown, it takes time to earn that trust, and even more so in smaller towns. Google does a great job of determining the authority of a website through other business actions.

The more connections you have with your local community and associations the better impact that will have on your rankings. But you have to make sure these businesses, networking groups, associations you are committed to in your local area are actually sending you an inbound link to your website, Google needs to see these signals. The more links you receive from your local market (even if you just become a member only for the link) the better your local internal pages will work that we discussed earlier. Combo these, and you're on your way to local restoration online marketing dominance.

6. Call Tracking

All of these tactics and strategies may sound good, but nothing is worth an investment in business unless we can track it and tie your sales back to its source. Some marketing strategies are more focused on lead generation (Google AdWords - soon to be Google Ads), and some are more focused on engagement and brand awareness (email marketing), and it’s important you understand this when establishing your marketing goals.

With call tracking, we can put in different phone numbers wherever we want to see which medium is driving the most phone calls. After all, that’s what we care about right? Make the phone ring. From there you can measure which medium is driving more phone calls and if you should put more money in a specific source and if you should remove money from another source. Once you know which marketing avenues are driving phone calls, you can track and listen to those phone calls to see if they were leads, resulted in sales and measure your ROI.

Here’s what a report could look like.

That’s 222 phone calls, only from the internet, in the last 30 days for one of our clients. Can you say that about your business?

The other great benefit of call tracking is quality control. This gives you the ability to see in real time when a call comes in from the internet and to listen to it. You can listen and see how your office manager handled the potential customer, how your project manager is communicating with homeowners and insurance. This helps make sure you have a consistent message across your company no matter who answers the phone and you don’t let any leads fall through the cracks. This is relatively easy to set up, and cost effective considering the return.

Conclusion

I hope you have enjoyed and learned a lot from these online marketing strategies. At Restoration Digital Marketing we implement all of these strategies and many more. While not all of these strategies are overly difficult, we understand not all restoration companies have someone in-house or the time to commit for implementing and overseeing these tasks. If your interested in learning how RDM can help you, we encourage you to reach out to us.