The $10M Google Playbook for Home Remodelers (Live SEO Audit)

[00:00:00]I'm about to live audit a real remodeling company's local SEO and show you exactly what it would take for them to rank at the top of Google in their local market. If you're the owner of a remodeling company or any home service business, you're going to watch me break down a real contractor's Google presence the same way we do for clients when they come to us, why they're not booking more jobs from Google, what's holding back their Google rankings, and everything it takes to fix this. I'm running through the five things that matter for home service. your Google business profile, your website and service pages, your reviews, your authority signals, and your local competition. Quick context, I've helped over a 100 home service businesses rank at the top of Google and book more jobs. Plumbers, roofers, HVAC, electricians, restoration companies, [music] remodeling companies, etc. The same gaps repeat across every home service business I audit. And in this video, I'm going to walk you through every single one of them. By the end of this video, you'll be able to run this exact audit on your own company. Let's get into it. Okay, so I just pulled up Google Maps, searched for bathroom remodeling, scrolled till the middle section, and I found Continental Construction in New Orleans. Just to clarify, we are not affiliated with this company whatsoever. They did not reach out to us. This is just public information that we can see on Google search. Quick disclaimer. So, I just used a tool, local dominator, not affiliated um but it works. And what we can do is we took a map scan of this Google business profile. So, not the website, the Google business profile.

[00:01:24]And it shows us how they rank on Google Maps and Google search results for this keyword, best remodelers near me. And I also did it for bathroom renovation near me and a few others. So, if you're not familiar already, every pin on this map, these little pins here, shows that if I was standing right here and I searched for this keyword, they would show up fourth. So, after three other companies.

[00:01:47]So, as you can see, they're not doing super well. They're not doing horribly.

[00:01:52]Um, but the goal here is to have these top three pins. So, one, two, or three across as as large of a radius as possible because a number three here correlates to a number three here. And as you can see, it cuts off after three.

[00:02:06]So, pretty much what these mean is you are not being found in the map pack. You might be found on maps if people are searching on maps, but you're not being found in this map pack, which is over 85% of all of the clicks or all the searches. So, let's take a look. They fall off over here. They're doing better in New Orleans and close to their business, but I can actually see how competitors rank. So, Home Resolution LLC. This is what their map looks like.

[00:02:33]Levels different. And we have Riverbend Renovation. They're also doing quite well. They're ranking first over here, surprisingly enough. Um, and the point here is is, you know, there's plenty of companies that are dominating their portion of the map, but these guys aren't for the reasons that we're about to cover. Um, and just to show you, here's Bathroom Renovation near me. This is how Home Resolution LLC ranks. This is how Riverbend Renovation ranks. And if we look over here, there's some companies that rank super well over here. And then obviously like down here, same sort of thing. So, um, bathroom remodeler near me, same sort of thing.

[00:03:11]Home renovation company near me, same sort of thing. This is incredibly important to track, by the way. So, as you can see, they have a Google business profile with 11 reviews. Now, just if you're not aware already, the importance of this Google business profile or this maps profile is everything. This is where over 80 to 85% of all of your organic leads are going to come from.

[00:03:31]So, let me show you why. So, when I search for bathroom remodeling New Orleans, the top three Google business profiles are showing up in this map pack. I have ad blocker on, but typically there's the sponsored section from PPC or paid search and then under that there's people also ask. Sometimes there's there's this popup and then there's the blue links or the SER results as they're called. So, your website ranks under here. But your Google business profile, which is probably the most undervalued asset in all of home service marketing, is ranking in the map pack. is top three.

[00:04:02]And the reason this is so critical is because look at it. It's so visual. You can see where they are if they have a showroom. You can see their names, their reviews. It's super simple. And so what we're going to talk about today is how we rank your Google business profile in this map pack, but also how we rank your website in the SER results or the organic results right below it. So first things first, let's just tear down their Google business profile. I want to start at the reviews. So they have 11 fivestar reviews, I'm going to assume. And if we just look at the competition here, it's not too competitive. There's Bath Fitter, which I'm pretty sure is a franchise. They have close to 400. And then we have a lot of remodeling companies hovering around like 40 to 80 reviews, which looks to be deemed competitive in this market. That's nothing. Now, as a remodeling company, you probably are thinking it's not easy to get reviews. We do two to four jobs a month. It's just not possible. And I want to say that that's just not true because we work with remodeling companies who do very low cadence, very high ticket jobs, multi6 figures, every single project. And they'll do a few a month max, and they'll be able to get 5 to 10 reviews a month using a couple different systems. The first system is asking everyone in that home to leave a review on your Google business profile.

[00:05:14]If you're doing a whole home remodel or just a entirely new kitchen and there's five people living in the house, there's no reason you can't get three to four reviews from those people in the house.

[00:05:24]Um, especially if they're all using the kitchen, they're all actually the customer, you're able to get multiple reviews per each job. Another tip is to have different stages of the process where you ask. So, if you're doing, you know, a full design to build or just a big home remodel, you know, a massive downstairs renovation, whatever the case is, um you can after the initial design process and the consultation process, ask for a review because you've provided value. You've maybe given them 3D mockups, etc. And at that point, you've provided them value and it's part of the service. So, you ask for a review then and then you can also ask someone else in the family for a review upon completion. So, that's first things first. And as you saw, it's not totally impossible to rank in the top three map pack with very little reviews, but these guys have what's called an exact match business name. So they have New Orleans kitchen and bathroom remodeling. There's no branding. It's literally just keywords in there. They have two to three keywords. So we want to do the same. This is continental construction.

[00:06:21]Now, for the average homeowner who's searching for any sort of remodeling or renovation keywords for that matter, they're not going to search construction company typically. Um when people think of construction company, they think commercial work. you might want to attract commercial work, but you're able to do so by also just being a remodeling company. So, if we get into this, I would recommend something like Continental Construction Home Remodeling New Orleans or Continental Home Remodeling New Orleans. And if they have one specific remodeling service that they really want to go after, whether it's bathrooms, kitchens, you know, basements, whatever the case is, a lot of people choose bathrooms just because of those quick turnaround times because you can do a low five figure job within a matter of days and you cash collect quickly which means you can scale quicker. So all your cash isn't tied up to some massive project. It's going to cash collect over the next 12 months.

[00:07:08]Kitchens and then obviously anything new construction is going to be a larger project. There's just so many other advantages to doing these quick turnaround bathroom remodels. The first thing is margins. You're going to take higher margins on these smaller projects. You can do them way quicker.

[00:07:21]So that means you can fill out your guys' schedules way more in the month, which means more jobs, which means more reviews. And the more reviews you're able to get, the higher you're going to rank on Google search, the more jobs you're going to get, the higher you can price yourself. And it's just a beautiful system. Real quick, if your home service business does over a million dollars a year and you want our help doing this full live audit system for you, book a free consultation with me at the first link in the description below. Let's get back into it. So, to officially change their business name, they would need to get a doing business as or DBA. And what this does is you're able to make legal documentation of this new business name. And that's what Google needs to potentially verify this when you actually go and change your name on your profile. I would also recommend if you're in any sort of competitive market, um, remodeling is a little bit less competitive just from an objective standpoint, but you want to be careful to just go and change your business name, you need to have a permanent sign ready to go with that new business name on it. You need to update all your main citations. So, go on Yelp, go on Angie, go on Better Business Bureau, go on House, all of those, Home Advisor, you want to update your business name to that new DBA. only then you can go to Google and change your business name. Assuming that they get their reviews dialed in and they get their business name dialed in, that would be a massive needle mover. But let's get into a little bit more of the nuances. So, let's take a look at their photos. When we just scroll through these, they actually have some pretty solid photos, but I'd want to see way more. As you can see, this is probably not a real office of theirs is my guess, given that it's downtown and it just doesn't look like a real office. Um, but you want to see way more photos. And these are also coming from what seems to be customers. So these are coming from reviews. The only profile photo that they've posted is just this kind of branded one. Um, which may or may not be a real project. They did way more photos, especially in anything visual like remodeling. People are going to scroll through your reviews. They're going to scroll through the photos. Um, and this is quite literally going to help your conversion rate. It's not just wishy-washy. People can see our gallery.

[00:09:20]This is incredibly important because if you rank on Google but people don't choose you because you don't have enough photos, you're not going to get the job.

[00:09:26]They do have a physical location which is incredibly important. And the reason I say that is when we look at their pin here, they have a physical map location.

[00:09:34]Now, if we just scroll down, like a lot of smaller remodeling companies won't actually have a physical location, Google business profile. They'll just have what is called a service area business profile like these guys. You can see they have a service area drawn around their dedicated service area and they are at a significant ranking disadvantage because Google doesn't have the same proximity signals, the same location signals in order to say, okay, this business is actually close to the people searching. Let's rank them higher because they're a good, you know, convenient option. with a service area business profile, which is actually what a lot of remodeling companies have. Um, you don't send Google any location signals and so they don't know if you're actually convenient for the search.

[00:10:17]Their main Google business profile category is general contractor. Now, if I go to their website, we can see are they actually GC and want to push for GC service um as their kind of main like business category or do they do remodeling? And it looks like they're just primarily remodeling. Um, so what I want to say here is you just typically rule of thumb is look at the top ranking Google business profiles for your target keyword. So if it's bathroom remodeling, let's just go out on a limb and assume they really want to push for bathrooms.

[00:10:46]Even though they offer everything, they really want to do those quick bathroom turnarounds. They're going to want to have bathroom remodeler as their main Google business profile category. and then they can put general contractor, home remodeler, um you know, kitchen remodeler as their secondary Google business profile categories. Same applies to if you want to push for more kitchens, make kitchen your your main Google business profile category. Only other thing I want to highlight here is they are not doing any Google business profile posts. So here's one, home resolution LLC. So they are also in a massive office building downtown and they are posting. So you can see they're putting out updates. These are called updates on your Google business profile.

[00:11:27]The one thing they're doing wrong is they have a call now button. And the fact of the matter is data shows very few people click on these posts, scroll through them, and then click call now.

[00:11:37]Instead, what you want to do is you use this learn more button, which it looks like they're doing, to internally link back to a service page or a location page, these are called money pages on your website that is relevant to that post. So, this is about their remodeling services. But as you can see here, it looks like they outline all sorts of stuff. This does actually look like remodeling, but they have um repairs.

[00:12:00]They have what looks to be like some termite or restoration services. You want to focus in on your main service and you want to use this learn more button on all of your posts. So, if you do a kitchen post, um you want to link to the kitchen remodeling page. Or if it's about a remodel that you did in, you know, South Kenner over here below the airport, you want to link to your South Kenner location page. And this helps Google index those pages and helps those rank. This is something most remodelers just do not know about. They use the call now button if anything.

[00:12:31]Okay, the last thing that I'll say is their physical location. I don't think it's a real location, but their physical pin is in downtown. It's in the French Quarter. And as you know, there's not a lot of homes in downtown in any major city. um and more so even if there are you know there's a lot of condos, apartment buildings, probably not your ideal customer as a remodeling company.

[00:12:52]You want to go for the wealthy suburbs.

[00:12:54]So what matters here is how close your physical location is to those target customers. So let's say I used to live down here in kind of like uptown New Orleans. Um beautiful area, a lot of historic homes along St. Charles Avenue.

[00:13:08]There's just an incredible amount of very large homes anywhere from like $3 to $10 million. And especially over here and by the park over here, it's just a money zone. So these guys, Schneider Con construction and Restoration, beautiful photos, but they have construction company as their main Google business profile category, which isn't ideal if they do want to push for just specifically remodeling searches. That said, their location is very good because they are the closest Google business profile in this entire area.

[00:13:39]they're the only one that is close to all these people and so they will likely rank better over here and get all that that attention from the wealthy kind of suburbs. Um, and you know there's other nice parts of the city. We have you know Old Me up here. Um, anything like kind of near the lake is also very nice. Lake View. Um, so having one up here is good.

[00:13:59]Legend Interiors looks like they're pretty dialed. Good location here. Duke Construction is solid. Horrible business name. horrible category, but um they have a good location. So, it really does matter your location. And this actually applies more so to hyper competitive searches. So, if we were looking at an HVAC or a electrician, there's just way more people, way more businesses with way more reviews. So, it's way more competitive, which means you really need to be close to your target customer. In this market, there's not that many good remodeling companies from an SEO standpoint. So, if you had a 100red reviews, they're all fivestar, you get a bunch every month, and you have an awesome Google business profile, you have an awesome website, um you can rank for a large portion of this map, which you'll see in a second. So, that concludes the Google business profile.

[00:14:45]Let's get into the website. So, at first glance, if we just go to their homepage, their website is set up a lot better than I would say most remodeling companies I see, but there's still a lot of room for improvement. So, let's actually start on the mobile version.

[00:14:59]So, we can just click to this and it shows me what it would look like on the mobile version. Massive navigation bar.

[00:15:06]This this is horrible. Um, if anything, we want to have this big old free quote button or if you'd prefer call now button, whatever works for your industry for remodeling. We see get a free quote works a little bit better. I would want to put this logo right here. Move this button a little to the right. Make it just a little bit smaller. And then put these three dots right to the right of that. So we can just have one line and it doesn't take up a third of the of the mobile version. This is called the hero section. So the hero section is this main first section that loads with the image, your main header, all your call to action buttons. This is actually set up super well. Um, but they have their business name. They don't have their target keyword here, which is a a missed opportunity. Um, and we'll get into the SEO in a second here. They have their main services, which is good. There's no mention of where they serve. So it doesn't say anything about New Orleans or Medie. And this is really important.

[00:15:56]The three things you need to have nailed for conversion rate sake on your mobile version or your desktop version of your um website is what you do, where you do it, and why they should contact you. And then actually the fourth is make it dead simple to contact you. So have multiple CTAs, which they do. They have a call now button. They have a get a free quote button. They have a massive form, which I think could look a lot better. Um, I would just make this background removed.

[00:16:23]I would make these boxes a little bit smaller, this one especially, and just cut down some of this kind of uh negative white space here. They have their licensing, which is important.

[00:16:31]Google looks at that and says, you know, are these guys real? Do they have their licenses? This is just a chunk of text that nobody's going to read through. I'm going to be honest. And so on the mobile version, it eats up a huge part of the screen. I mean, nobody's going to read through this. Um, it just looks bad.

[00:16:46]There's all these double dashes, which looks like full AI content, but they do have their Google reviews right off the rip, which is really good. Um, and they have dynamic Google reviews embedded here. I'm not sure where it's pulling 24 from given they only have 11 here. They might have a second profile, but this is set up pretty well. Project gallery, um, is relatively solid. Um, but again, not necessarily needed to be at the top given we have a good photo here and we can have photos just a little bit later.

[00:17:15]They have this other huge form which is just not necessary. We have one in the hero. You should have one at the bottom of the page as well which they don't. So I would put that form down there. They do have their service pages set up here which is important. And these all link internally to the service pages which is important as well. That's called internal linking. Again they have our gallery but they also have another gallery section here. Um which is good.

[00:17:39]And I would say I would stick with this rather than this one. And I would put this at the bottom. Um, this is an image, so it's not even text. So, Google is going to have trouble actually reading through this, which is really important. Um, this content is less indexed. Massive section of text. I can tell that they worked with an SEO company at some point or they tried to do their own SEO. Um, but this just doesn't work anymore. Like, this page is not ranking on Google well for a reason.

[00:18:05]They have way too much text. It's all AI content and there's not actually helpful sections on their homepage. Another thing we'd want to see is, oh man, they have their blogs just embedded here. Um, I would just get rid of these. Nobody's going to really read these transparently. I'd make this map smaller. And then I would also put a section with all their locations they serve within the market. So I'd have a um, you know, a little map section with Mey, Jefferson, Herahan, you know, city park area, um, Ottabon, Gretina, Mey, etc. put that all in a little map section with clickable links to every single location page. The reason you need dedicated service pages for every service and location pages for every location is because it helps Google understand what you do and where you do it. But how you connect those is crucial. So let's go to the top here. As you can see, they have home remodeling dropown kitchen and bathroom. And then they have a home builder page which is new construction. So each one of these pages, these service pages, is optimized for their specific location that they're trying to target. And they have these six main locations, which are fair.

[00:19:13]These are the main six I would want to target, too. But they've done this a little bit incorrectly in my opinion. So when we look at hrefs, which shows essentially how good is their website traffic, how many keywords are they ranking for, they rank for virtually zero keywords, they get virtually zero organic traffic, and they really never did actually. They got 500 on one day of November, a few days of November. So, and they also used to rank for more keywords. Really never in the top three though, which is all that matters transparently. Top three or top 10. And so, what this means is my theory is correct. They have these kind of spammed location pages that aren't set up correctly. What I recommend is having a dedicated service page for every service that is unoptimized from the location.

[00:19:57]So you just have a home remodeling page, you have a kitchen remodeling page, you have a bathroom remodeling page. You don't make 30 of them. You don't make 200 of them. And then what you have is a service areas drop down or a areas we serve dropdown. And that should have a page for every location you service. And instead of having a service page for every location, so bathroom remodeling gratina, bathroom remodeling meny, etc. You want to just have these dedicated few service pages, dedicated few location pages, and then on those pages have internal links that you can click that also lets Google's crawlers go through to the other location pages. So from your bathroom remodeling page, you want to have a link to your Gretina location page, your metery location page, etc. The reason for this is it helps Google crawl and index these pages and say, "Okay, they do bathroom remodeling, but where?" Oh, they do it in Gretna. They do it in me. They do it in greater New Orleans. Awesome. We know where they serve. And kind of to recap on this little tangent, the reason this is so important is because Google wants a lean, efficient website. They don't want bulky websites anymore. They actually have too many pages on Google to crawl every page every day. It's literally impossible. And so if you want Google to trust your website and want to recommend it and also just make it easier to crawl, you are going to want to have fewer pages that are more efficient that just properly internally link together and you can get the same message across instead of having 200 service times location pages. Okay, enough said on that front. So, when we look at their onpage SEO, this refers to their metatitle, their description, their canonical URLs, their URL in general, which is good here, and their header structure. It's actually set up really well. Um, they're missing their X robots, but that's not a huge deal. They have the right target keyword in here. I would target kitchen remodelers in New Orleans because it has a little more search volume. We just see more people search it. But really, it's it's done pretty well. Um, this is solid. I wouldn't change much. Their page content isn't great, though. Um, when people land on this, it just looks, you know, it just looks kind of weird. There's so much text. Nobody's going to read through this. Um, massive form. Again, there's two forms. You don't need these.

[00:22:08]And it's just the same issues we covered on the homepage. You also want to have more local content. So, what about me specifically influences your remodeling services that, you know, Greta doesn't or New Orleans doesn't? You want to have local information to show Google we're a local authority on our location pages to have them rank well. We want to have really good local information that sounds like it's coming from a local.

[00:22:31]You want to have local landmarks mentioned and not just tourist sites, but like real landmarks that people actually care about. You want to have transit directions to your office location. Um, and you want to just make it super simple for this page to be helpful to someone searching for kitchen remodeling in New Orleans. Lastly, you want to have really good FAQs. They don't have any FAQs. FAQs are just going to help you rank in AI search, which is growing right now, and it's super important. So, now we've covered their Google business profile, their reviews, and their website. Let's talk about authority signals. So, when we go to hrefs and we look at what are called back links or referring domains, referring domains are essentially any sort of other website or domain that links to your website. The best example I can give here is imagine that these little buttons right here, let's say this linked to another construction company's site. that would count as a backlink. So that other construction company, assuming Google trust this one, will get authority spread to them because Google trusts this website. This website links to your website. Boom. Now Google trusts you a little bit more. And so you don't have to worry about things like domain rating or domain authority.

[00:23:36]A lot of SEOs will kind of use those buzzwords. Um they are a factor, no doubt, but for local SEO, they don't actually influence this here map pack very much. Um, and anyone who says that they do, I would say that they're probably incorrect right now, just in this current state of the algorithm. But what backlinks do matter for is if you get really good local backlinks or industry relevant backlinks, these will help you rank in the map pack. They'll also help you rank in the search results. So, how do you do this? You do not go to Fiverr and order a 500 backlink, you know, citation submission, um, because it's going to be spammy links. They're not going to help you.

[00:24:13]And if you work with a real firm in the future like us, we're just going to get rid of a lot of those cuz they're going to be really crappy links. They're not going to help you. You want to do real outreach to local businesses. So, other contractors, other home service companies, any company in the market. It could be a cafe. It could be a restaurant. It doesn't matter. Local newspapers are great. Local magazines are great. Give them content. Offer to pay or sponsor the submission and you can coordinate to get back links from those sites that point to yours. and Google says, "Oh, it's it's a real local business in the real local market that trusts these guys. These guys must be a local authority. Let's show them at the top. We want people to find them." And then the other form of backlinks that's really important here are citations. So citations are going to be things like Yelp, Yellow Pages, Angie, Map Quest, um, House, Home Advisor, all of those things. All those sites are called directories. And if you get listed in there by making a profile, as long as it has a link to your website and you use all the right name, address, and phone number exactly seen on your Google business profile, you are going to be able to get more authority in Google's eyes because you're listed on all these business directories. So, go set up the main ones. There's about 20. And then you can also set up local ones like, you know, New Orleans business directory or there, you know, there's going to be 30 to 50 per every local market, which are super important. So now we've covered authority. Google trusts you. You have the right website foundation. You have conversion rate set up well. You have a dialed Google business profile. You're going to start ranking in the maps.

[00:25:41]What's missing? Well, your local market.

[00:25:44]So when we go back here, I can tell you all this stuff about, you know, our best practices and what we use for our clients that do generate millions of dollars. We made our clients $20 million in the past two years attributed directly to our organic SEO and our Google ads. But the point here is there's things I don't know and the only way to learn them is looking at your local market yourself. So you can set up a tool like this or just use Google Maps and search from an incognito um and stand in different parts of the city.

[00:26:11]You can see who shows up. So these guys rank really well and their business name is not advantaged for remodeling keywords at all. They have good reviews and if we check right now they got one last month, they got one a year ago.

[00:26:25]They're not even getting many reviews.

[00:26:26]So, they do have a physical location and their website looks to be so so nothing impressive. If we look at their areas we serve page, they don't even have dedicated location pages. Their website honestly sucks. So, this this just speaks to this market is not competitive. Um, and if we throw their website into hrefs to just take a look, they have some referring domains, they have a little bit of domain rating, they do rank for some keywords, and they have more traffic, which is very weird. um chances are it's an older domain maybe um or they just actually do good work or they have other branded search. These things can all play into it, but this is a weird kind of outlier market. But my point here is you want to look at the people that are ranking well. You want to go to their Google business profile and their websites. See what keywords they're targeting. Check on hrefs or Semrush or Moz or a free tool and see what links they're building, what directories they're listed in, how many reviews they get. That is how you know what it takes to rank in your local market. So, if you run this exact local SEO audit yourself on your market and your business, regardless of whatever type of home service business you run, this should give you clarity on what you need to do in order to rank higher and start showing up first in all the local search results. You should now know exactly how to rank at the top of Google and run this exact local SEO audit system for your own business. That said, if you do over a million dollars a year and you want our help implementing this full system for you to book more jobs from search results, book a free consultation with me at the first link in the description below. See you in the next one.