(VIDEO REPLAY) DEEP DIVE #1: Google My Business Plus Google Ads = $$

Hello, hello, recording. All right, we’re recording. Welcome everybody. Welcome to Deep Dive #1. We are going to talk about Google My Business and Google Ads for a 1-2 Punch today. Let’s do this. I had a little test a few minutes ago, but let’s just make sure. Raise your hands if you can hear my voice. You can just go to your little… Oh, yay. All right. Okay. I got it. Good, good, good. I’m going to lower all the hands. I’m lowering all the hands. Okay. Now if you can see my screen, raise your hand.

Valerie VanBooven:

Woo-hoo. Okay. I’m going lower all the hands now. You’re good. Thank you. All right. So also if you hear dogs barking, my apologies. We have dogs. The kids are trying to wrangle them. And the next thing I want to tell you is there are two ways to ask questions. There’s a Q&A section on your little dashboard, or your little control thing you have. So you can do a Q&A question there. I will answer at the end. I’ll go through and answer all the questions.

Valerie VanBooven:

Don’t wait till the end because I’ll take them in the order received. So go ahead and ask questions there or you can put them in chat. Either way, doesn’t matter to me. But we’ll answer all the questions at the end. But don’t wait. You just go, if I’m talking about something and you have a question, go ahead, and ask it. All right. All right, so let’s get started. All right, we’re going to do a little bit of review. So last week we had a huge webinar. Tons of people attended. If you didn’t watch it, you probably should. It was pretty long, but you could even listen to it if you want to. I posted it everywhere. Send out emails about it. It’s also on our podcast.

Valerie VanBooven:

It’s available on our podcast and I can send you all the links to that. But that was a great webinar. Everybody seemed to love it. Thank you very much for all the wonderful comments. This one should be equally as good and next week, and the week after. We want to do a lot of education, but also let you know, in doing that that yes, we provide all these services. But the way I’m presenting it is, so that you can do these yourself if you want to. And you can take care of this on your own. You don’t have to hire anyone to do it for you. But for a lot of you, that’s the easiest, most cost-effective way.

Where is Your Audience?

So having said that, we’re going to review just a tiny, tiny little bit about what we talked about, to give you some context. And we’re in talking about where your audience is. So obviously in the state of the world right now, your audience is on their mobile device or on their desktop. But for the most part, I would say even our seniors right now, especially our seniors, are on their mobile devices, iPads, phones, and on their laptops. This is the way we’re communicating with each other right now, whether we like it or not, this is where we are.

Lead Patterns

So we all get it that we can’t go network in person right now, but just know your audience is definitely looking at their screens. So it’s time to up your game. It is time. If you either haven’t taken this seriously in the past, or you just relied on referrals, and you now know and understand the value of having a really good internet long-term empire building kind of presence online, it’s time to up your game. It’s time to have that realization. It’s always been important. But for some of you who have relied on referrals for so long, and I get it, that’s the way business has been done. But it’s 2020 and we’re in the middle of a pandemic.

Valerie VanBooven:

We’re going to have some issues with this for a while. So making sure you are doing the very best you can online, is really important. Okay, so this is the seven step… I mean I’m sorry, the sales funnel rule of thumb. And what we know from advertising throughout the year, 7, to 10, to 12 interactions with your brand, before somebody is going to select you as their provider. And right now we’re a little bit more limited. So the only one I’ve crossed off here is in person networking. So we know that leads come in and inquiries and people who want information come in from Facebook, your website, Google, your email list, referral sources, and from newsletters.

Valerie VanBooven:

They come in from all these places and people start out in all different kinds of positions and paths. Sometimes they start out back here where they just know something’s wrong, concerns start getting pretty serious. They’re doing some research, some tire kicking. Is it assisted living? Is it home care? What am I going to do? And then they start preparing to take action. But as you know, mom doesn’t want anybody to come into the house, or she doesn’t want to move, or whatever it is. And then all of a sudden something happens and that’s it.

Valerie VanBooven:

The straw that breaks the camel’s back. So you want to be with these people. You want to be their go to, from the minute they start thinking, “Oh Lord, my parents are getting old”. You want to be with them from the very beginning, all the way through to the day when they say, “Yep, this is it. We need help in the house,” or “I can’t take it anymore,” or “She’s gotten sicker or she went to the hospital and she’s being discharged. Whatever path people take, sometimes they skip from here to here really fast. And sometimes this is over six months, a year, two years.

Valerie VanBooven:

If you stay with them in an organized way and I’ll show you what that means, then you win. So this is a path that we’re talking about taking for all things internet marketing. All right? And this is what I want to review with you from last week. The sales, marketing and recruiting philosophy that we use is the one that works. We’ve been doing this for 12 years. If you don’t know me or haven’t met me before or watched any of our webinars, my name is Valerie VanBooven, I’m a registered nurse. I’ve been doing this internet marketing for senior care businesses for 12 years or more.

Valerie VanBooven:

George Novoson is my business partner. Bob Costello is our business development manager and we have an amazing staff and team behind us. There are somewhere between… And we have writers, I don’t exactly count the writers, but if you counted all the writers, we’re about 17 of us. And the writers we should count because they’ve been with us for a long, long time. Most of them never leave or they haven’t left yet. They put up with us. So, we’re a big team, or I guess a small team and then we have our ancillary staff.

Sales, Marketing and Recruiting Philosophy That Works

But we are really involved in everything that goes on with our clients online marketing. And we do pay attention and we do respond quickly. So this is the philosophy that works. Your website is the hub for everything, your CRM, whatever that is, delivers. And if it delivers well, that turns into additional revenue for you. So what is a CRM? A CRM is a contact relationship management platform. This is how you organize who you’ve talked to, who you’re going to talk to and how you’re going to talk to them.

Valerie VanBooven:

This could be an Excel spreadsheet for some of you, it could be your Outlook, or your Gmail, or Constant Contact, or HubSpot or you might be using our SMART CRM. People are loving our SMART CRM, for years and years and years. Ever since I’ve been doing this, and George can attest to this. People have said, “I wish there was a marketing and recruiting CRM that was designed for senior care businesses. That wasn’t crazy big, like Salesforce, wasn’t just for staffing and scheduling and it was really for marketing. And it’s really for recruiting.”

Valerie VanBooven:

Because that’s actually marketing too, right? And we could use it and it’s not going to overwhelm us. So we finally found the solution and modified it for senior care, and everyone has their own needs and preferences. Everybody has their own budgets. If you’re an Excel spreadsheet user, that’s fine as long as you’re using it to your advantage. Okay. So here’s the sales funnel and today we’re going to talk about what’s in the pink right here, Google Ads. So leads and recruiting and all of the folks that are out there inquiring and wondering what they’re going to do about mom and dad, are coming in from different places. We’ve already talked about this.

Valerie VanBooven:

Facebook, your website, organic, they found you organically. They found you naturally on Google. Google Ads, your email list, referral sources, website chats, phone calls. They come into a CRM, they call you, they fill out a form, and they end up in your database of contacts. And if your CRM is working for you, it will automatically put them into an email drip campaign, a monthly newsletter, a database re-engagement campaign, tasks, appointments, calls, one-time emails, and texts. All those things you can do, and you can automate most of them. You don’t have to automate all of them, and you can make this work for you. So no lead is left behind.

Valerie VanBooven:

No senior left behind. No lead left behind. No child of an aging parent is left behind. Everybody is contacted, everybody is on your list. And they’re in some kind of campaign that helps you keep track of them, and keeps you top of mind in their eyes. Okay? So that’s what we do for our clients. So now we’re going to talk about Google My Business. That’s what we came here for. That was our review. Now we’re going to talk about Google My Business. All right, I’m going to tell you the first things first.

Google My Business

If you want the free checklist, I’m going to go through this, but if you want the free checklist and I’m going to go through pretty much everything on the checklist, you don’t have to have it in front of you right now. You go to our website, asnmarketingplan.com A-S-N, Approved Senior Network marketingplan.com/gem, G-E-M. And GEM stands for Google Enhanced Marketing. Anyway, asnmarketingplan.com/gem. I’m saying that a million times for the folks that are listening on a podcast later. And you can download that for free. You can have it and you can do all these things. Okay?

Valerie VanBooven:

So there are three important parts to get into the three pack. You know what a three pack is. Here’s a word I despise, snack pack. I do not like that word. Anyway, goofy internet geeks like me, or not like me, because I don’t say this word, but they call it the snack pack. That is grossest… I don’t know why that bothers me. Anyway, so you want to be number one though. You want to be right here, and you want to be in this. It used to be that they would list like seven maybe of these listings, but now they’re down to three.

Valerie VanBooven:

And you know why they’re down to three? This is the first page of Google. If you type in home care, Houston, Texas, on this day, whatever day I took this screenshot, our client was number one on the first page of Google. And the… What was I going to say about that. Well it used to be seven of these. You can be in the map listings here or six or whatever. But they’ve decreased it to three so that they can put more advertising in your face. Right? Of course. So this is where you want to be.

Valerie VanBooven:

Your website content, your Google My Business listing, and your citations are what matter to get here. And there’s some other things, there’s probably 200 other things that matter. But if you had to narrow it down to the three that were most important, it would be these three right here. So that’s what we’re going to talk about. I’m going to show you some success stories and explain to you a few things, and then we’re going to talk about exactly what to do.

Valerie VanBooven:

Okay. Look at the top right-hand side of my screen here. You see results from February 2nd of this year. This is a client who… This is what we call a geogrid or a geomap. And there are programs out there that will let you do this. So what happens is, first of all, remember everything is mobile now. So if you are in the car and you’re sitting in front of your office and you type in home care or assisted living, blah, blah, blah, and it’s your business, you’re probably going to see your business pop up because you’re right there.

Valerie VanBooven:

But if you drive five miles down the road and you type in that same search, you’re going to get a different result. Because you’re closer, mobiley closer to another home care agency or another Pizza Hut, or another sandwich shop or whatever it is you’re Googling. So this is a geogrid. So what this says is, if I really want to know how I look within like a say a one-mile radius of my office… And this is just for fun, you obviously you want to show up more than one mile. But, if I want to know how I look in a one-mile radius of my office for the keyword phrase, Home Care Rochester, or Home Care St. Louis or Home Care whatever your city and state is, I’m going to run this geogrid.

Valerie VanBooven:

And most of you have no idea where to do that, and that’s okay. But this just shows you exactly where you are. So in other words, this client is number seven on the maps for Home Care Rochester on February 2nd, 2020. Number 13, number 12, number 12. So he’s not even in the three pack at all. He is way down there, even within a one-mile radius of his office. And that’s not great. I mean, you want to be in the three pack within a one-mile radius. So now this next picture, this is April 19th. So this is yesterday.

Valerie VanBooven:

Yeah. This is what he is now. So he is in the three pack. He’s number six here, number five, number five, number four, number four, number five. So this is a much better picture than it was just a few months ago. So I’m going to go back. Here’s where he was, February 2nd number 13, not even on the first page of Google bottom. Not too great. And now he’s in the three pack. So that’s where we want to see everybody. Now notice that was February 2nd to April 19th. This doesn’t happen overnight. This takes some time and some effort.

Valerie VanBooven:

So you have to be patient with this. This is what happens though when you really treat Google My Business correctly, and you do it right, you will get these kinds of results. But a lot of things have to happen. So let’s get ready to see what that is. Oh, one more thing. This is another client. Now you can see who the client is and I’m going to tell you a little story about what happened here. So the keyword phrase up here is Home Care Charlotte, okay, you see that? And this is our client.

Valerie VanBooven:

And for years and years, we kept this client number one on the first page of Google, and then their franchise which this happens, made some changes to their website, actually improved their website, did some changes and it’s a beautiful website. But when they did that, some things got lost in the translation and oftentimes web developers can create a beautiful website. But they don’t do any SEO. That’s normal. So she noticed that all of a sudden, for a long time, this is back in February, you can see the left-hand side of my screen.

Valerie VanBooven:

February 25th, 26, 27, 28, March 3rd was the day I got a ticket. Now this is a client that we’re blog posting for and doing other things, but we did not create their website. Remember they’re a franchise. So on March 3rd she put in a support ticket and said we’re no longer even on the first page of Google for Home Care Charlotte. We’re like second page, third page, I can’t even find us anymore. And she was right. If you look at this March 23rd, they were number 24. So that’s second page of Google.

Valerie VanBooven:

So I said, “Okay, let me take a look at things. Let me analyze what’s going on.” And I said, “If you can give us, if your franchise can give us access, I’ll go in for free and SEO your website for you, redo it. Because that information that had been there for so long was lost.” Home Care didn’t even show up on the first page of their website or wasn’t even listed on the first page, those keyword phrases. So I went in, we SEO’d the website, the behind the scenes stuff, a couple of things on the home page. And here’s what happened.

Valerie VanBooven:

March 10th if you look down here at the bottom of my screen, March 10th they were number 31 and then March 11th, boom number one. Now if you scroll way up the screen here, you can see that for some reason on March 27th they were number 18, but then they went back to number one and they’ve stayed there ever since. So here we are, April 20th they’re still number one on the first page of Google. That is the power of SEO and the power of making sure that when you’re working with Google My Business your website is also in good shape. I just want to illustrate that.

Valerie VanBooven:

So you got to learn to think like Google. There are three main components. Proximity. Proximity describes the physical distance of a business from the origin point of the search. That means those geogrids I showed you. I want to know how I show up within a one-mile radius on a mobile device. I can run that for you. I can tell you, this is the strongest factor in determining ranking and the least controllable.

Valerie VanBooven:

Relevance the degree to which a listing matches the search. If you’re searching for car mechanic, they’re not going to show you Pizza Hut, right? Prominence, the strength of the business in terms of SEO. Prominence is based on information that Google has about the business links, website, content, and directories. Remember I said citations, we go all the way back. The top three things or your Google My Business listing, it was the SEO of your website and citations. Citations are listings in other business directories.

Valerie VanBooven:

Doing these things will improve your Google My Business ranking. Note, GMB optimization, GMB is Google My Business, can be stunted by poor website optimization. So that’s the example I just showed you was the website is beautiful, but no one had really search engine optimized the website. The behind the scenes stuff counts just as much as the pretty stuff, or more than the pretty stuff actually. And so when that’s not done, you lose your ranking. So you have to make sure that all of your pages have a main key word and location.

Valerie VanBooven:

So here’s what we do to help Google My Business, and your website match up. Title tags. So that means at the very top here, each page that you see, has a title behind the scenes that most people never see. That has to be correct. So it has to say Home Care Charlotte or Home Care St. Louis or Home Care, whatever, city and state. Correct alt tags, an alt tag, you see all these images? So all the images on the home page and every page of our website, there’s an opportunity for your web developer, your SEO person to add some content there.

Valerie VanBooven:

A keyword phrase and description that has to be filled out. Correct content, so we don’t want to talk about dogs or politics on our home care website. That’s pretty obvious. You need content and regular content. This means that even though you have a beautiful website, if you don’t do any blog posting, if you don’t change it up, if you don’t add content once in a while or change it up, then it’s just kind of like you might as well hand somebody your brochure, because it doesn’t really do anything.

Valerie VanBooven:

Easy to read content. You will read articles that tell you that you need a 2000-word article, that’s correctly SEO’d or search engine optimized in order to get anywhere on Google. And that’s not true. It is true to some extent, especially if you are like us, you’re an internet marketer by trade. So competitive, of course I have to write 2000 words, and I don’t often. But that is something that an SEO will tell you.

Valerie VanBooven:

Well, actually in this day and age, engagement is important too. So a 500 to 600-word article, which is two or three paragraphs, with a picture, that has the correct alt tags, and is engaging to the reader and is informative to the reader, is more important than writing a 2000-word dissertation that nobody cares about. Okay? So short, easy to read, easy to digest content is important, and you can’t copy from other sites. It has to be something unique.

Valerie VanBooven:

Correct schema data. Well, what in the world is that? Well that is a behind the scenes kind of thing that your website should be doing for you. It’s a type of code I guess would be the best way to describe it, that tells Google who you are and where you’re located and what you do. And it’s really important to get that right because Google relies on that. It’s a computer, it’s reading the backside of your website and it relies on that to get good information.

Valerie VanBooven:

So you definitely need correct schema data. NAP, a NAP is a name, address, and a phone number. I’d like to take a nap right now, but that’s not what we’re talking about. It’s a name, address, and phone number. So all of your citations, all of your directory listings, your Google My Business, your Facebook, your approved senior network business listing all your care.com, caring.com, wherever you’re listed in the world, Better Business Bureau. I don’t know, MapQuest, I don’t know. All of them need to have the same company name, address, and phone number.

Valerie VanBooven:

If you spell it differently or you leave something off or whatever, then it’s not the same, it needs to be exactly the same. And the phone number, the phone number oftentimes we use different phone numbers for tracking things. Your real office phone number should be the real phone number you use on all of your directory listings. And of course, as you know, 100% mobile optimized. So this is what makes a difference on your website. If I were working with someone who was developing my website, I would take a screenshot of this slide and say, “Do I have all of these things, because I really need them?”

Valerie VanBooven:

And ask your web developer or your SEO person if they have taken care of all these. That’s what I recommend. Screenshot this picture right now. Send it to your web developer. All right, here we go. This is what is on your checklist. At least a portion of it. This is what we do. And so I’m going to go through all of these things. I’m not going to read this because we’re just going to go through them all. Okay?

Valerie VanBooven:

This is on your Google My Business listing. So if you don’t know what a Google My Business listing is, let’s talk about what I’m looking at here. We already kind of looked at this. Okay, this is your Google My Business listing, right? And if you were to click on this, it would open up and you could see a little bit more stuff. This is your Google My Business listing. And there’s a lot you can do with this now that you couldn’t do before. So that’s why we’re talking about this.

Valerie VanBooven:

When you have access when you are a manager or an owner of your… And you should be, okay, let’s stop there. Owner, you should be an owner of your Google My Business listing if you own the company. An SEO company, a web developer, folks like us that get hired to do this, we should not be the owners of this listing. It’s important that you are the owner and it’s important that you have added other people that you trust. A wife, a business partner, office manager that’s been with you for years. Somebody else to be a manager of it.

Valerie VanBooven:

And when people interact with us and we help them, they make us managers. We don’t own their listing, we just help manage it. But you want to make sure that if you get hit by a bus tomorrow, that you have somebody else in your world who manages your business, can also make changes to this. Because it’s important, more important than it’s ever been, especially when everybody’s on their mobile device. So inside your Google My Business listing, there’s an opportunity for you to choose a primary category. Once you’re logged in, you can go to info and choose a primary category.

Valerie VanBooven:

That primary category, if you’re a home care agency, should be home health care service. And I get it. If you’re nonmedical, you are not a home healthcare service. Trust me when I say that is the only one that really applies to you. Google doesn’t understand the difference, nor do they care. So just choose that one. And then what is available to you that was not available before is the opportunity to add subcategories. Please do this. Don’t do this. You see where it says vital sign monitoring and there’s no other words. Don’t do that. Always add a description.

Valerie VanBooven:

I put this up here so you can see the difference. There’s no description with the laundry services and vital sign monitoring. Make sure you go through and add a description, even a link to your website, to the page where this appears. You can add that there too. Make sure you add a description. It can come right off your website. You probably already have this somewhere, but make sure you add subcategories. Okay? That’s really helpful.

Valerie VanBooven:

Highlighting products. Okay, 90% of the people who are on this call do not sell a product. I totally understand that. But who cares? So what we did for this company is we took their services and we created some cute images. This is not hard to do. You can use PicMonkey, Canva, there’s lots of image editing, things you can use. And we created squares, in each one of them listed their service. And then what we did was we put a little description in, and the learn more button goes straight to their… Sorry about that. I got to make this disappear.

Valerie VanBooven:

The learn more button goes straight to the page where this is listed on their website. Do this. If you are a franchise owner, you probably cannot do this. Most franchises turn this feature off. I don’t know why, but they do. So, for brand uniformity I suppose. But if you’re independent and you can do this, please create these little images, and add them to your… Under a product, add them there and put a little description. Do it, do it, do it. Because look at this, look at this. This is the Google My Business listing.

Valerie VanBooven:

Look at these products in home care services, personal care, companion services, this shows up really nicely to the public. And the categories that they’re under also show up nicely. I love this option. You should definitely do this. Okay, images. Definitely add some images. Now a little bit of controversy here. You can see all the images that we added. You want to add your logo, you want to add a cover photo, you want to do those things. But you can also see that a lot of these images we added were stock photos and that’s not really great.

Valerie VanBooven:

But when a client doesn’t have a whole lot of photos otherwise, we go ahead and add some stock images and we work with the EXIF data. If you’re not a photographer, and I’m not. You might not know this, but every time you take a picture there’s a data stamp on that picture, somewhere that tells the person who took the picture or some something like that. The person took the picture, the type of camera used, the location. It depends on your settings on your camera. But what we do is we take the images and we change that EXIF data to match the place where our client actually is.

Valerie VanBooven:

So instead of this saying, this is a big stock photo, which we do purchase all of our stock photos by the way, these are not lifted off of Google. These are not free images. Don’t ever do that. We bought these and we added them to this person’s Google My Business. So what you want to do is… And we changed the EXIF data. Meaning we changed the location, the longitude, the latitude and what it says. Each one of these is a service that the person provides. So we put a little description with the photo. This is a video, we’ll talk about that in a second.

Valerie VanBooven:

And these are pictures they actually took, which is really what you want. You want to have some candid photos of you, your staff, your office, your desk, your banner, your brochures, your therapy dog, whatever it is you’re doing. You don’t have to put clients in there, but you can take pictures of staff, the outside of your office, the sign on your office door, whatever, and upload them here. That is really what people want to see. They’re not as interested in seeing these canned stock images. But either way it works. I would always though, to see if you can add some other images and we’re going to talk about video in just a second.

Valerie VanBooven:

Next, this feature is turned off right now, but it is coming back. And you will see it. You need to respond. First of all, I don’t think right now you cannot ask for reviews on Google. It’s turned off. And that’s because of the coronavirus issue. People are closed, service is slow. People have to wait in line, those kinds of things irritate people to no end. Even though we are in a pandemic and we need to be kind to one another. That kind of stuff freaks people out, and they tend to leave negative reviews really quick and Google knows that.

Valerie VanBooven:

So they’ve turned off reviews, it will come back, and it will be turned back on. So you can’t even respond to a review right now probably. So if you have an old ones out there, you probably can’t respond. That’s okay. Don’t worry about that right now. Google is also working with a limited staff and people are working from home, believe it or not. So this will be something that you need to pay attention to though. Every single review that is out there, you need to make sure you respond to it.

Valerie VanBooven:

So whether it’s a great review, you don’t have to write a dissertation. Just a thank you note, go back. I don’t care if it’s two years ago. Go back and answer them and say thank you so much for your kind words, whatever. Do that. And then this is an example, I didn’t use a home care agency. I used one that was just sort of an example I found. This is a great example of a negative review. A lot of you get reviews from disgruntled employees, negative reviews, Facebook, Google. I’ve seen it all, who are mad because they got fired or let go.

Valerie VanBooven:

And the very best thing you can do is respond to that review in the most professional way possible, that shows the world that they’re an idiot. No, not that they’re an idiot. Everybody gets angry when they get a negative review. It’s just human nature. Don’t answer right away. Sleep on it. This is the right way to answer negative review. “Tim, thank you for taking my call this morning. Here are the notes from our conversation.” Oh my goodness. So this person just put the little Tim in the place.

Valerie VanBooven:

And that’s what you should do, not be rude, just be very super, super professional. Outline the steps that were taken and hey, if the person’s mad about the fact that they got fired, say, “This is what happened. This is what we found. Here’s how we corrected it and here’s our policy.” Be professional. You don’t give out any personal information. You don’t have to give out any names of anything. You just professionally answer it, and everyone will appreciate that. And everyone who reads the review will understand that this was handled well, and the person might just be a complainer.

Valerie VanBooven:

Okay? So do this. All right. Google My Business ongoing management. All right, after you get done setting up your Google My Business page, and there’s a few more things in here that I didn’t go over, but I think they’re coming. Once you get done setting that up, ongoing interaction with your Google My Business page is really important. So I wanted to just show you a couple of things. When we’re doing this for a client, we post a Google My Business twice a week.

Valerie VanBooven:

Something inspirational, something… Right now, this was taken before the COVID thing. Right now they’re mostly COVID posts and that’s okay. Whatever is, is inspirational, educational and lets you put in your website address and your phone number. That is what you should be posting. Give people some happiness. Just like on Facebook, we do a lot of inspirational posts and people are like, “Well what does that…” You know what? People engage with that, they love it and you should be posting that kind of stuff.

Valerie VanBooven:

In the middle, you see an offer. Now I picked one that’s not a home care offer, because most of you don’t do offers typically. We do have a few. But this is an offer you can add, and you can put a time limit on it. This is June 4th to June 18th. So if you wanted to, you could always add an offer. And then this is an event… Sorry, there’s the dogs. So this is an event and you can put… Your event doesn’t have to be a, I don’t know… I mean I use these terms loosely. So in other words, May is Older Americans Month.

Valerie VanBooven:

Older Americans Month is, I don’t know, kind of an event and you might be doing a lot of things for May or saying a lot of things about Older Americans Month or maybe you’re holding a webinar. But that event lasts from May 1 to May 31. So think creatively about how you can use these things, so that when somebody sees your Google My Business page, boom, they see this kind of stuff that is important. Be creative.

Valerie VanBooven:

All right, here’s our friends that Always Care. For their Google My Business page, what we do is we make sure that all their blog posts, this is a blog post. This is one that they created. When they create a blog post and we post it for them on their website, it automatically shoots over to Google My Business. And it’s always there. So always there. Because they always care. We love our Always Care folks. So this is just a post that we put up and this is one that came from their blog.

Valerie VanBooven:

So you can automate this so that every time you blog post, it automatically ends up on Google My Business. That is an option and Google My Business is okay with that. There are some challenges with bigger franchises, smaller franchises, maybe not so much. But if you’re a big franchise and I’ll say like comfort keepers, home helpers for sure. Like Pizza Hut, it would be another example of that. They don’t allow this kind of auto posting. So if you’re an independent business owner, yes, absolutely. If you’re a franchise that’s big, probably can’t do this. But if you’re a small franchise you might be able to. It just depends on how you have things set up.

Valerie VanBooven:

Okay, videos. So any of you who have been our clients know that, for our clients we create two educational videos per month, and we put them on Facebook. They are very short. You can’t post a long video on Facebook and expect people to watch it. And you can’t post a long video on Google My Business because they won’t let you. So these are under a minute, this is a little thing about their caregivers and whatever. So we had already created this for them, so we added this to their Google My Business page for them and that works out perfectly.

Valerie VanBooven:

So you can add short videos like 60 seconds or less maybe to your Google My Business page. All right, so we want you to add a short name. Now this is another feature that you’re going to have to wait on until this whole crisis thing is over. It’s one of those features that’s been temporarily turned off, but it will come back. And it’s just like this. So in other words, if you have ever sent somebody to your Google My Business page and asked for a review, the URL or the website address you have to send them to is really long and gross.

Valerie VanBooven:

And so what they did was they allowed us to shorten it. And so everybody gets a little short name now. And so there’s a smaller website address you can send people to for Google reviews. It’s not a big deal. It can be done later, but it is there. So that’s something you want to do. The Q&A feature. Ooh, I love this. And you know what? You can also do this on Facebook in a much more limited fashion, but you should do it. Okay.

Valerie VanBooven:

So this Q&A feature, again, temporarily on hold. But here’s the deal. You’ll notice when you go to a Google My Business listing that there’s a Q&A section. I don’t even know if they’re showing right now, but there’s a Q&A section and usually there’s not a whole lot there. But you as the admin or manager of the Google My Business page, can add the questions and add the answers and they’re okay with that. So look at the QA portion of your website and think, “I can just take all these questions, add them in one at a time, then go back and answer them.” And that’s awesome. So you can do that.

Valerie VanBooven:

It’s on hold, but it won’t be on hold for much longer. So I would say by the end of mid-summer, these will be turned back on. Again Google’s working with a limited staff or limited functionality at the moment. There’s stuff all over the thing that tells you that. So anyway, but add them in. Go through your QA. Do you provide hourly home care? And notice how this is phrased to be a keyword phrase, Home Care in Houston. Yes.

Valerie VanBooven:

And then they just answer… You know, I put it in and then I answered it. I put it in, and I answered it. These are right off their website. I didn’t make it up. I didn’t guess at it. We do this for our clients. So you definitely want to make sure that you add questions and answers when it’s available. Here’s something you can do. It’s not turned off. And also, I didn’t add in this, there are COVID-19 updates available, and if you provide video services, meaning video capability or you can virtually check on someone. If that’s something your home care agency provides, there’s a section in Google My Business that lets you add the link to that, to describe it. Please go in and do that.

Valerie VanBooven:

If you have a COVID-19 update page, then you can go in and add that link to your Google My Business page. If you have a COVID-19 update period, like “Yes, we’re open, we’re in essential service,” you can go in and add that. We’ve done that for our clients. So there’s lots of things you can do that aren’t in this presentation that are specific to COVID-19. And some other things that are turned off for a little bit.

Valerie VanBooven:

But this is not. So every Google My Business page comes with a goofy little Google website. And the idea behind this originally was that every business should have a website. So Google created these goofy little one-page scrollers that you can use. Now, nobody that we have as a client would ever use this in a million years, but it’s not that bad. And the good news is, you should be able to update it and you should update it. So it already comes prefilled. So it’s inside the little panel, control panel.

Valerie VanBooven:

When you’re logged in, you can see website. And you can go over there, and you can look at it and you can open it up and you can edit it. And so what we do is we edit it and we put in the keyword phrases, links to their real website here, their phone number, things like that. So if you were to scroll down through this page, you would see all their posts, their contact information, contact us now, get a quote, call now, get directions. I mean, it’s okay. It’s just not the greatest thing ever. But definitely update it. This is the about us section and you definitely want to put that stuff in there.

Valerie VanBooven:

All right. When somebody comes to us and says, “Hey, I want you guys to do this,” we also provide monthly reporting. So I just threw a picture of it in here, so you could see what monthly reporting looks like. It shows you your reputation manager, how you’re ranking, how many citations you have, what kind of action your Google My Business listing is getting. So I just threw that in there, so you can see what that looks like. Here are, we talked about citations. These are the top 50 citations by Domain Authority.

Valerie VanBooven:

What is the Domain Authority? That means, a website in Google’s eyes is very reputable and trustworthy. The highest number you can get is a 100 and the lowest of courses is zero. So these are in order by, how Google feels about them. I don’t know why Apple is at the top over Google, but anyway. So you can take a screenshot of this, make sure your business is listed correctly on all 50 of these and that will help you tremendously. Make sure your business is listed correctly.

Valerie VanBooven:

We do this in an automated fashion. We do not do this by hand. We have someone else do this for us because it is a time consuming guh. But we do say to all of our clients, “Here you go. 50 citations or 25, depends on the program they’re in and we’ll take care of that.” So we make sure that the exact address, the exact name, phone number and address that they want to have on the internet, is actually showing correctly on all of these. And the ones that are in yellow, by the way, are the ones that you have to do yourself.

Valerie VanBooven:

You have to manually do them as the owner of the business or marketer because either a, they’re going to call you, b, send a postcard, or c, you have to be in front of a computer when you do it. So these are the ones that require manual intervention. Google My Business, Facebook, but the rest of these can be done by a service. Okay, what happens when you get really active on Google My Business? So what does it look like? I want you to log into your Google My Business control panel and I want you to look at what your stuff says.

Valerie VanBooven:

Let’s click on insights. Insights is sort of a reporting tool and switch over to one quarter. Now by default, this is only going to show you one month, switch it to one quarter. Well, 2.14 K total views. So, they were found, or they were seen 1.73K times on search and 412 times on maps. Customer actions, visits to your website, requests, directions and call you. I want 173 calls a quarter. I don’t know about you, but if my Google My Business listing is giving me a 173 calls in a quarter, I’m really happy about that.

Valerie VanBooven:

This is a different business over here. Same stuff, 2000 times they were seen on search in a quarter and 1,740 times they were seen on maps. And then this one got 96 calls in the last quarter. 46 people asked for directions. Typically, you’re not going to get a lot of asking directions, because you’re a service business, unless you’re assisted living then people definitely will. Most of the time, the asking directions is an employment seeker, and 109 visits to your website. I will take these numbers all day long. This is what happens when you’re active on Google My Business.

Valerie VanBooven:

This is another thing that shows up on your insights page. Photo views. This is our client. This is in one month. Now, this is one month. They got 1,240 views of their photos on Google My Business. Businesses like you, other businesses in your area, only get 201 views in comparison. That’s what happens when you’re active. I want a 1,000 views of my Google My Business page. I don’t care what they’re looking at, I want them to know I’m there. And then photo quantity. This is how many photos you have versus businesses like you in your area.

Valerie VanBooven:

So your photos receive 516% more views than similar businesses, post more to stay ahead. They’re not kidding. They want you to do this stuff. And so when we take over and do it for them, or if you can do this, a couple times a week and get everything up to date, you’re in business. What happens if you don’t update for 90 days? If you haven’t logged in, in over 90 days, Google isn’t sure if it trusts your listing anymore. It’s looking for accuracy. So you’re going to get a message like this via email. Is your business information accurate? Here’s what people are seeing on Google for your business.

Valerie VanBooven:

It’s asking you, please log in and do something. We don’t want to show junky stuff to people visiting. We want to show good information to people who are searching on Google, and we need you to update your business profile. So that is why you get those emails. All right, I’m going to take a breath for a second, and does anybody have any questions about Google My Business? If you do, please go to the Q&A section, and ask it there. There are no questions in there right now and/or if you want to you can put it in chat if you’re not sure how to do the rest.

Valerie VanBooven:

So go ahead and ask questions. That is everything I can tell you about Google My Business. Where did you go to see all those stats? Well, I went to our clients, people we are actually managing their Google My Business and we’re posting twice a week. I went to their Google My Business page and then I clicked on the left-hand side, I clicked on insights and insights is where you get all that information.

Valerie VanBooven:

Okay. What do you think some franchises limit what we can… Why do you think some franchises limit what we can do if it actually helps [inaudible 00:48:52]? Okay. Well, I know for a fact that Google My Business does… Well, there’s a couple of things. First of all, if you’re a large franchise, the only thing they’re limiting for you is products. And that’s because you typically don’t sell a product. So they just have that turned off as a default. I don’t know why. I can’t speak to why that is. I don’t know that, what we do with the… I don’t know it’s not necessary, frankly.

Valerie VanBooven:

But what Google does, and this is not because your franchise requested it, Google does not allow large franchise organizations to do auto posting. So Pizza Hut cannot automatically post something to all 10,000 locations all at one time on Google My Business. It is Google’s rule, not your franchise orders rule. And that’s because I guess they can they don’t want somebody posting the same exact thing on 10,000 different, or 400 different Google My Business listings all at one time. I don’t know the true answer, but I’m going to guess that’s part of it.

Valerie VanBooven:

Let’s see. So that’s that. How do I access the EXIF window for updating image data? Well, Sarah, we use a specific program for that and if you just Google, change EXIF data on a photo, you could probably find some free… We have a paid thing that we use as an agency, but I think if you just Google, change EXIF data on an image, you can find some free stuff online that’ll let you do that.

Valerie VanBooven:

Can we update our Google My Business listing now and have it be automatically active when the hold is lifted mid-summer? No. Well, okay. So the answer is for reviews and for frequently asked questions, you cannot add anything right now. And for the short link, you cannot add anything right now. They won’t let you, you can try. It’s not even there or it’ll just exit out. It just won’t let you, so you can’t update anything. You can update all the other things. You can do as much as you want right now on that except for those three things, questions and answers, reviews and shortly those are turned off.

Valerie VanBooven:

But don’t wait for that. Go in and optimize every single day, you can post, you can do everything else. As a new client, [inaudible 00:51:24] or is this something I need to do myself? If you are in our GEM program, Google Enhanced Marketing, we will be doing it for you, Lynn. If you’re not in that program, you have access to all the free resources, but we don’t do that automatically as part of our scope program. I still haven’t received a postcard for Google. In the meantime, another location is showing up under our name and it’s a long-term care. Indie I don’t know the answer to that. That would be something have to talk about, but yeah, Google’s a challenge sometimes.

Valerie VanBooven:

Costs we’ll talk about later. What should we do if someone else owns our Google My Business page listing? Oh, if somebody else owns it, if you’re a franchisee, then your franchisor might own it and that’s okay. They do that on purpose. But you should be able to manage it. But if it’s another company, like in marketing company, you need to work through… Send me a ticket and I’ll give you the instructions on working through that. You can talk to the person, you can talk to Google if they don’t respond. There’s a little process you go through. Yeah. You should own it.

Valerie VanBooven:

If a client reviews us now, what happens to it? Does it get archived or can we see it though it doesn’t get posted? Nobody can review you right now. They’re turned off so you don’t have to worry about it. There’s no reviews available. You should still get reviews though. Approved Senior Network, if you have a listing there free or paid, you should go get some reviews for that. You should go to care.com, caring.com anywhere else you can get reviews. Do it. Don’t wait. But they won’t even be able to leave you a review right now. So there’s not an option.

Google Ads

Okay, let’s go on to Google Ads and I’ll answer the rest of the questions when we get done here. So Google Ads plus Google My Business makes the phone ring. Senior care leads philosophy. If you’re going to spend the money, stay organized. A Google Ads campaign that contains… Oh, okay, so here’s what we do. And you can do this too. You do not have to have all the things we have. Google Ads, you can set up an account and you can run it yourself. What we do is we have a campaign that contains 2000+ keyword phrases and a 100+ negative keyword phrases. A negative keyword phrase minimizes, in our case as senior care marketers minimizes job seekers.

Valerie VanBooven:

So in other words, in the past, when you run a Google Ad, you get a lot of people who are looking for a job clicking on that ad. There’s no way to prevent that 100% but now Google Ads has allowed us to take more steps to prevent that, which is nice. Negative keywords like careers, CNA, home care jobs, those negative keywords. We put that in with your campaign, your Google AdWords campaign, Google AdWords, Google Ads, Google clicks, pay-per-click, it’s all the same thing. We put that in there for you.

Valerie VanBooven:

And that way, if somebody types in home care jobs, your ad doesn’t show up. We don’t want job seekers on Google to waste your money clicking on it. So we try to avoid that. Okay? So that’s what a 100 negative keywords means. we can also do Facebook, or you can do Facebook, but we’re finding that as of this March, Google Ads tend to work better, especially in certain locations. So I’m always going to kind of direct you to our Google Ads. We can do Facebook Ads. We’ve had some real good luck with that and really good… It’s worked pretty well, but in some cases, in some locations, especially in a rural area, it does not work that well. So, we point everybody toward Google Ads.

Valerie VanBooven:

Target your local area. You can target your local area, it can be adjusted by radius or by zip code on Google Ads. It could be radius, it could be county, it can be towns, it can be anything you want in Google Ads. The potential client has four ways to communicate with you. They can call you, they can fill out a form, they can text you and they can email you. Those are the only four you really care about. You just want them to be able to communicate. You want to give them enough options but not overwhelm them. And your CRM should help deliver those options.

Valerie VanBooven:

When we do this, we make sure that you are instantly notified by email and text when a new lead comes in, and that potential new client also receives an instant text. Remember everybody who’s answering these ads pretty much, I’d say 80 to 90% are on a mobile device. So they’re already on a mobile device. You might as well communicate back with them on a mobile device. So when somebody fills out a form, and I’m going to show you what that looks like. They get a text right away that says, “Hey, we’re here.”

Valerie VanBooven:

I’ll show you what it looks like, but it lets them know you did receive their information. And then your CRM gets loaded up. They fill out a form, they’ve contacted you, and we organize them by category. So let’s look at what that looks like. So here are some sample Google Ads. Have you ever typed in home care, whatever city, and state you’re in, and seeing somebody at the very top here and it says ad right next to it? That’s part of what we’re talking about. We want you to be here or we want you to be up here above the map. That’s where we want you to be.

Valerie VanBooven:

So here are some different ads that we use. I’ve marked off the names, but you can kind of get an idea of what a Google Ad looks like. You’ve seen them. There’s always a little green ad next to it to let you know that’s an ad, and here’s a sample landing page and we use landing pages for a reason. Your website is beautiful and fine, but it has a lot of options and a lot of information, in that they’re designed for that. When we use a landing page, we eliminate the clutter. And when someone is in a crisis or they’re not very web savvy or they’re not sure what to do, they need two things instantly.

Valerie VanBooven:

They need to know who you are and what you do, and they need to be able to communicate with you without having to think. Don’t make me think. So your phone number or click to call. Click to call’s typically for on your phone, click to call your phone number is right here and there’s a form. That’s all we care about. We want to mirror what’s in the ad, and we want to give them an opportunity to fill out a form and gets more information. This over here on the left is what it looks like on a mobile device.

Valerie VanBooven:

So call us right now, and then it mirror’s what’s on the ad and then there’s a form. Whoop. Sorry, there’s a form right there. So we’re not giving them too much information, we’re not overwhelming them. It’s easy for them to communicate. And that’s how it should be, easy to communicate. And Facebook, this is what Facebook ads typically look like. And we’ve done this in a million different ways by now, so you can run the similar ad with a similar type of form, right on Facebook. It’s a completely different animal. And the way we handle it is different. It’s a story as opposed to what somebody searching for. It’s just a different ball game.

Valerie VanBooven:

But if that’s something you’re interested in we can do that too. And here’s what it looks like. If you use our CRM and you might not, you might just want emails to come to you. That’s okay. But usually when we do this, we’re doing it for somebody. We make sure it all comes into one place. And here’s what it looks like. So this bigger picture right here shows you that these are the people who’ve answered an ad. You can see seven, six leads here. This is sample data, these are not real.

Valerie VanBooven:

And then people we’ve contacted, people who scheduled an appointment, people who have started services, people who are not applicable because maybe they were Medicaid qualifiers and we don’t do Medicaid, or whatever for whatever reason. And then people who did not start services. And this might be somebody who you did an assessment for, and they decided to go with another company or whatever the case. It’s up to you. These columns or these categories can be changed. But this is kind of how we manage it. And for sample purposes, this is what works really well.

Valerie VanBooven:

And this is what a sample lead looks like. And I’m sorry these are all marked out, but obviously I can’t give out any information. So inside the CRM, what you can see as first name, last name, email address, phone number, and then here’s the communication portion in the middle. So you can see that somebody filled out a form and then boom, they received a text. Thanks for filling out our form. We’ll be in touch ASAP to answer your questions. Thank you. And there’s a little more to it, a little personalization there.

Valerie VanBooven:

And then also inside the CRM under additional info you can see, how soon do you need care immediately? Male or female? Female. Permission to send more info? Yes. Place of service? In our own home. And at the very bottom, if you can see it here it says, “My wife was discharged from blank. She currently sees an oncologist for breast cancer.” I can’t read it now, “She needs a little blah, blah, blah.” So they put in some comments there, which is awesome. So you want to make sure this stays organized.

Valerie VanBooven:

So this is what it looks like inside our CRM. If you don’t use a CRM or you don’t use our services, please make sure that when a lead comes in, you know exactly how to respond to it. You know who’s responding to it. And you have a way to keep track of that with an Excel spreadsheet or outlook or something. Google Ads budget. What do you pay Google for clicks? Now I know some home care agencies spend 3,000, 6,000, 7,000 yeah, a month. Especially in very competitive places. The minimum spend, the minimum you can pay Google to get any traction at all, and it’s going to depend on your area is $300 a month and that’s $10 a day.

Valerie VanBooven:

Remember this, a click on Google. When someone clicks on your ad, that click for home care typically, depending on where you’re located is going to cost anywhere from 2 to $5 a click. If you’re in Manhattan, New York, you’re going to have to spend a lot more. If you’re in Westwind or Maka Nevada, you’re going to spend a lot less, it depends on where you are. If you’re running ads at $10 a day, that means that if let’s say clicks costs you $3 each and it’s going to depend on the keyword phrase and all kinds of crazy stuff, three clicks, three people click on that ad and you’re done for the day, you’re done for the whole day after three people click on your ad.

Valerie VanBooven:

So sometimes people look for their ads in the afternoon and say, “Well, I can’t find my ad.” And I’ll say, that’s because three people have already clicked on your ad today and they have shut off for the day. It’s not going to spend more than $10 a day on your ads. So if you want those ads to run all day long and you want more clicks, you’re going to have to increase your budget. But 300 a day is the minimum. Some people are stuck with that and that’s what they want and that’s what they can spend. And I get it and that’s okay.

Valerie VanBooven:

I recommend that you spend 600 per month and up. Not everybody can do that. But I would say spending 20 or $30 a day is probably a better bet for most people. So you have to decide what your budget is. This is what you paid directly to Google for clicks. Okay, this is what you pay them. You do not pay us for that. You pay directly to Google. If you’re doing it yourself, stick with something low until you know how to work this stuff. Because it’s complicated and you can go through $300 in 10 minutes if you don’t know what you’re doing. So you need to make sure you’re comfortable with running your own Google Ads.

Valerie VanBooven:

Okay. So how much does it cost? How much does it cost if we do it for you? That depends on a lot of things. It depends on your budget. It depends on what services you’re involved in. It depends on what you need. There’s all kinds of things involved in that. So yes, I’m avoiding that question because there’s no way I can give you a specific answer because I don’t know you enough to know that. But you can go right here. Now this is a Bitly link, so you have to pay attention to what this says here. It’s bit.ly/scipleads. We call this a SCIP Program. This is Senior Care Inquiry Program bit.ly/scipleads, Senior Care Inquiry Program Leads.

Valerie VanBooven:

So if you go to this link, it’ll take you to the page that describes the program and how to get in touch with us and how to talk to us. Yes, we have to have a conversation. We don’t sell this online. Like you click and buy your lead and dah, dah, dah. It’s not like that. This is you. It’s exclusive to you. And we don’t share your leads with anybody else. And if we run these for you, we take it very seriously. And it is something that we talk to you about first.

Valerie VanBooven:

There is a form at the bottom of that page. If you want to talk to Bob and get more information, let him talk to you about whether it’s right for you, learn more about you and you guys decide together if it’s something you should do or not. We’re fine if it’s not, if you want to have a conversation with Bob and have a conversation with Bob, okay. Ask questions via… Oh, so you guys have been asking your questions. I’m going to answer those free Google My Business download. If you want that free Google My Business checklist that I kind of went through already. Go to asnmarketingplan.com/gem, G-E-M, G-E-M, asnmarketingplan.com/gem. SCIP Leads are at bit.ly/scipleads.

Questions and Answers

Okay, and I’m going to take questions here in just a second. This is for next week on Tuesday. Deep Dive #2, the most cost-effective and organized way to recruit caregivers. There’s a lot of services out there you can purchase and buy and pay for. I totally get it. We are not trying to be all end all amazing recruiting stars of all time. Everybody’s got a great program, but we’re going to show you our way, and we’re going to show you how to do it really cost effective. So you’re not locked into anything. You don’t have to buy something for a whole year or six months in advance. You just do it as you need it.

Valerie VanBooven:

And if you want to register for that, here’s another Bitly link for you, bit.ly/ddrecruit that’s Deep Dive Recruit, Deep Dive Recruit, ddrecruit. I will also send this out to you, and we’ll talk about Facebook mostly, we’ve had some really good results there and it’s not the way you guys would run a Facebook. It’s the way we would run it, which is a little bit different. And then Indeed, ZipRecruiter, Craigslist, we’ll show you what our folks are using, what other people are using and what they’re doing.

Valerie VanBooven:

Full online applications, no more PDFs. We’re going to show you how to do that. Organizing the process, using a CRM built for senior care, and a short demo on how it all works together. So we’ll look at all that and we’ll record it and all that. So hopefully you’ll register for that.

Valerie VanBooven:

Okay. Let’s go back to our questions. Chat, there’s two in chat. Let’s see. Okay. Where do I find your podcast? I will send that out to everybody when I send out the replay, I’ll send you the links to the podcasts. I missed how to get Google My Business, I Googled it and didn’t find it. Oh, oh, to get to Google My Business, you just type in, a Google search and type in Google My Business, and it will tell you where to go to get to Google My Business. Does an owner have to start Google My Business, or can someone do it for them?

Valerie VanBooven:

Oh yeah, somebody can do it for you, but you will have to receive a postcard in the mail, Shelby. So you have to watch for that postcard and then you have to share with us or whoever does it for you. You have to share with them the code that’s on that postcard. That’s important. And it takes about five days, three to five days to get the postcard. All right, let’s go back to Q&A.

Valerie VanBooven:

What are the costs for your services? Typically, Jennifer, I would love for you to speak with Bob and talk to him about what you need or don’t need, and then he can share what costs are. There’s usually packages or buy one thing or this or that. Let’s see. I’ve already answered this. Okay. Raphaela sorry if I said that wrong. Do you put more SEO efforts into homepage or local listings if you’re privately owned business with multiple locations? Basically, do you want location, homepage to rank or main homepage? Okay.

Valerie VanBooven:

If I had a home care agency or a business, but I had lots of locations, we get this asked us a lot when we develop websites. What do you do? Do you put all your locations under one website, or do you have what’s called a multi-site implementation? Meaning each location has its own mini website. It’s one big website. So this is what a franchise would do, and I think this works really well. They typically have one main website, but everybody underneath them has their own sort of mini site.

Valerie VanBooven:

It has all the same information, but the location stuff is different. The URL is a little bit different. It’s stlouis.homehelpers.com or whatever. I’m making that up totally that’s not how it works. But every franchisee or every location has its own mini website. So they can blog posts from that location. They can have their own Facebook. It depends on a couple of things. How many locations do you have? Do you have three or do you have 30? it depends on how interactive your staff is. Are they willing to do some blog posting?

Valerie VanBooven:

Do you have somebody that does it for you? Lots of variations. Also, how close together are your locations? If they’re hundreds of miles apart, that’s a different answer than if they’re like five miles apart or 10 miles apart. So, I would want to see the location. I would want to know more. I would want to know what the locations are, and what your current website says. And who are you having trouble getting visibility with. And those things would help me determine what your best SEO effort is. So it’s a great question.

Valerie VanBooven:

It’s kind of a complicated answer, but if you go to our website at asnmarketingplan.com and you fill out a form, I will put a notation in that, if it’s Raphaela, Raphaela that we need to think about how she’s got her business structured as far as locations. Christina says, thank you. Thank you, Christina. How do you prioritize PPC ad spend? Do you do it for the top three listing or is it only across the board on their products? How do you know how much you should be spending on PPC?

Valerie VanBooven:

Okay, so for pay-per-click or Google Ads, you got to think about your budget. So the priority really is what can you afford and where are you driving those and what kind of results are you getting? So when you first set up a Google Ads campaign, there’s a lot of optimization that goes into it. You’re kind of running blind at first and then as the week progresses and as two weeks progress, what you’re doing is you’re looking… This is how I do it anyway, or we do it.

Valerie VanBooven:

We look at what Google keyword phrases people are typing in, and we look at what you’re spending money on. So if people are consistently typing in assisted living and you’re a home care agency, we want to make that a negative keyword, because you’re wasting money on the word assisted living. You’re not getting any conversions for that. So you can’t optimize it right off the top. What you do is you take the first week or two, and you work on that Google Ads campaign almost every day or every other day or so.

Valerie VanBooven:

And you watch and you see what people are typing in and you adjust your campaign to give you the best results. So it’s not as if… Day one, you could definitely get a lead, there’s no doubt about it. But what you want to do is you want to give it some time and you want to optimize it over time, and you want to continuously do that. You don’t want to be… Maybe people are typing in, some kind of free service that’s near you. Like some municipalities have free senior services or there’s some kind of program that’s available to you guys, and they type that in and for whatever reason they also see your ad and they click on it.

Valerie VanBooven:

Because they’re not web savvy and they think you’re that organization and they are wasting, right? So we want to put in a negative key word to get rid of that search so that people aren’t… You’re not wasting your money on clicks from people who are searching for a free service. I don’t know how else to explain it, but it takes a couple of weeks to optimize a PPC campaign. Hope that helps. Historically my franchisor does not allow landing pages. Don’t know why, any alternatives?

Valerie VanBooven:

Well we create a landing page, we don’t ask the franchisor about it. It’s up to you. If you have a great page that you think is pretty good to serve as a landing page already on your website, like a contact us page, that looks pretty nice, we can run into there, but the problem is then you lose all the tracking and you have no idea who clicked on what dah, dah, dah, dah. So typically we just set it up. But it’s up to you. You can run it however you want.

Valerie VanBooven:

Is this service applicable to home health agencies? Of course. Absolutely. Home health agencies are who I’m talking to 90% of my day. So if you’ve relied on referrals for a long, long time, but you’re looking for home health, you’re a Medicare certified and you’re looking for more activity based on that, then yes, we have programs that are modified just for home health agencies. We can switch back and forth. I’ve been doing this for 12 years for nonmedical, medical, assisted living care managers, you name it. We’ve been doing it.

Valerie VanBooven:

Franchise is doing website and Facebook posts for us. I would like to switch it to you guys. I have an appointment with Bob coming up. Thanks Cindy. I understand. Thanks so much. Okay, so I think I’ve answered all the questions. Does anybody else have a question that I didn’t answer? Oh, as a marketer, how do you edit your Google listing? Well you have to log in to Google My Business to edit it. Let’s see. Will there be a recording of this webinar? Absolutely. Absolutely. We’re recording it right now and I will send that out to everybody.

Valerie VanBooven:

Okay. So if you want to be on the most cost-effective way to recruit, and believe me when this pandemic is over, you’re going to need caregivers or maybe you need them now. And recruiting should not stop and has not stopped, so don’t rest on that because it’s going to get crazy, bit.ly/ddrecruit. That’s for next week. I will send out the real link too. If you want to talk to us, go to bit.ly/scipleads or you just go to our website, asnmarketingplan.com. You’ll find everything there. There’s a form on the homepage at the bottom. Just scroll down and you can fill that out, and we will make sure Bob has an appointment with you.

Valerie VanBooven:

All right, thank you everybody. I hope you guys have a wonderful rest of your week, and I will see you next week on our next Deep Dive. Come over and talk to us and we’ll help you in any way we can. But I hope you get a lot out of this and I hope you understand how some of this stuff works. Thanks everybody. Bye-bye.