EP204: Navigating SEO and Google Ads: Insights from Tim Brown of Hook Agency

Yes, sir. Yes.

Hook agency, we're in Minnesota and that's, you know, a lot of the land of 10,000 lakes. So that's why I started with like kind of the fishing vibe. I don't actually fish that much if I'm 100% honest with you, but in marketing, you need a hook. And so that was another kind of like the reason that we came up with that name. And then, uh, you know, it's eight years ago that we started the company. I started, I worked for another agency. I wanted to have a specialization when I got into this. So first couple of years, I had like a business coach who was like, hey, what do you have? Like, what's a good niche and all that. And at the time, I kind of resisted, but I had more like contractor and home service clients at that time than anything else. So as time went on, we just got more and more of those and kind of pushed into that. And then in 2021, my wife said, I am sick of all these other types of clients because she runs the business. There's some clients you're doing really good work for, and then there's other clients who are like, we're not as good at this. What we found is the specialization thing really helped us to create some momentum in both the services and our sales and marketing. Our ability to get customers went way up once we had specialization. That comes in the form of our services, which are Google specialized. SEO, PPC, websites. And now we do Google Maps SEO and LSA, ad management, and then the types of customers we're working for because home service businesses, a lot of them have similar types of problems. But we're really focused on roofing and HVAC and plumbing. So those are like our three biggest ones. And they just need a lot more leads, you know? You think about like for years there, this last like five years, like remodelers didn't feel like they needed more leads. It felt like they were just drowning in them and stuff like that. We kind of went where we were needed.

So we're really pushing into HVAC right now, HVAC and plumbing. We have 75 roofing clients. So we have more roofing clients than anything else. But I'm just basically, I'm really excited about HVAC. It's such a big industry. Like you look at like 400, what is it? 400 billion, I think. I believe that roofing is like 100 at max. at max. So it's kind of the size of the industry. And what I also like, to be real with you, what I like about H-Track is there's a little bit of a barrier to entry. You know, there's industries where it's like, and marketing is one of them, right? Like people talk to contractors, they, can I swear?

So I'm just going to make it really awkward then. They fricking love marketers, right? Yeah. Contractors. Yeah. No. Oh yeah. No. Usually. Cause it's like, it's, it's a very low barrier to entry. They've gotten ripped off five times. So like, I kind of like when the barrier to entry is a little higher on industries. Like, I think it's good for the industry. You know, there's actual like certifications and licenses and stuff like that, that you have to get, which is generally positive. Not that I'm like a, like get the government in here. kind of guy, but it really does kind of help the industry a little bit.

Billy Bean is the money ball guy. Nevermind. Yeah.

He's a famous marketing guy. I haven't followed him a ton, but Billy something. Yeah, it is crazy. Like, what's that other dude that teaches? He's like, he does the YouTube ads and he's like in his garage with a bunch of crazy cars. He's like, get into marketing. You can just sell it right now, even if you don't even know what you're doing. It's like, I'm not trying to rip on that guy.

It's funny because I do, too. I get I get those. The there will be like a email that comes in that's like your website is broken. You need help with your SEO. And it's like, man, I do SEO. You can't even figure out that I do SEO. And then plus. I mean, I always want my SEO to be better, but we have 1,000 people on our website every single day. So it's funny because small business owners will get these emails and think that this person is doing a real audit on their website and that something's actually broken.

I'm always impressed by those two. I, I'm trying to think about if there's ever been a time where I've really bought something. I'm sure I bought something off of a cold email or a cold call. And I respect the hustle. I always like when I, even when I'm hanging up, I'm like, Hey, Hope you're having a great day. Bye. But as a small business owner, it's just crazy the amount of constant bombardment that you get by these people. And even though I respect the hustle, I believe in, I generally try to live by the golden rule on these things. If you wouldn't want it, then don't do it to other people. And I think that respectfully, even though I've tried cold calling and I've tried all this stuff, I think. ideally as businesses, we learn how to attract customers. Like, and I think that that's what I'm always trying to do is try to figure out how can I learn how to attract people so I don't have to do as much like cold stuff. Right. And I think that that's really like why our business is built the way it is and not to go crazy into our services or anything like that, but to create more leads that come to people naturally. And I think that that's just basically a good ideal to work towards is like. Creating an attractive business where the leads are coming into you without having to go knock on somebody else's door. And in roofing, because that's my biggest, like the most customers I have, that's our biggest competitor is door knocking. Yeah. And I respect the hustle. I'm never going to talk smack about that. Right. I totally understand. It works, by the way. Sure.

And I even give it credit. Like it's a better, it's like a, it's almost a more, it's a more controllable lead source. And anything you can do that's a controllable lead source is great. However, I want to run my business in a way that I would like somebody coming to me versus me having to go knock on their door. So that's the way I'm trying to run my business and trying to help other people do that as well. Well,

Yeah. First, I want to say like, I try to tell people how to do it themselves. Like I, um, on our YouTube channel, I have a series that's like 14 videos. 40 minutes long, each one tactically showing you how to do it from scratch with WordPress and then building links and then getting content onto your website and doing keyword research and stuff like that. So I actually like, I give it all away, but honestly, sometimes I feel like it's for nothing.

Because most contractors will not take the time to do it. You can go watch everything. It's everything that we do, maybe even better in a way. Cause when you do it yourself, There's just something about that where you're motivated and it's really, really like if this is going to make me money right now, like as a contractor, if you really took your SEO seriously, you could take five hours on every Saturday and make yourself a bunch more money. But most people will not do that. Right. If you wanted to, it's hookagency. com slash DIY. And you could watch all 14 of those videos and do it from scratch. Now it is time. It is time and it is money. Right. Like it's still money. Even when you're doing SEO yourself, if you're building links, you need to spend some money on the link building and stuff like that. And sometimes there's tools and things like that, but it's like not that expensive. Like I think I brought this one all the way up to my friend who's on the other end saying, can you turn off the leads kind of thing? It wasn't a lot, but it was like, he got five calls all in a row or something. And it's like, can you turn off the leads? front with 1500 bucks. And essentially it was like 10 hours. So it is, there is the ability to do it. It is time. Now I'm a guy who's done it a lot. So I probably can do it a little bit more efficiently than some people, but there's ways to do it yourself. The thing that people get wrong, I think the biggest thing that they get wrong is not understanding it enough to even delegate it. Right? Like if you don't know what the basic components of SEO, are, then you will get taken advantage of. And there's a lot of people that are selling cheap stuff that are selling almost nothing, right? The cheap stuff in particular is usually nothing. Like, cause for instance, like people charge thousand bucks for SEO. Like we spend more than a thousand dollars within each of our, you know what I mean? Like, it's like if you were supposed to be doing a bathroom remodel. And the guy down the street comes up with a quote for $1,500. And you're like, I'm spending $5,000 within our quote. Right. I don't know how this guy's going to do that. And it is a lot of those kids that are kind of like they don't really know what it takes to rank a site on Google. So understanding enough to know, hey, that's not even enough money for the raw materials of this thing. And I think that. The other thing that they get wrong is just not following money with effort. And I say this a lot. You need to follow money with effort because just because you're spending money on either doing it yourself or an agency or a freelancer or anything like that, you could waste a lot of money of them spinning their tires because you're not communicating with them or you're not making sure that it's accurate. Or you're not giving them the key information that they need. A big one is make sure your SEO company knows your service areas and knows all the most lucrative services of your company. You want to give all that information. And that takes effort. It takes effort to delegate well. It's like if you had an employee and you didn't take the 5-10 minutes in the morning to tell them about priorities for this week or this day. If you don't tell them. If you don't have clarity there, then that person is going to waste time. And that is what happens when people don't follow money with effort. If you're spending money, spend a little bit of extra time and effort to make sure it's spent well.

We call that pay to go away. Yes. Exactly. Pay to go away. Like I'm hoping that my, I don't have to take responsibility for my marketing problem. Now, I don't know that a bunch of my clients are going to watch this and I would probably talk a little bit differently if you were currently giving me money. Like I want to, I want to be empathetic to that idea that like, if you are paying money, you should be getting leads for sure. If it's one lead, that's not great. You know, we're trying to keep our lead costs, for instance, on Google ads under 200 a lead. And there is something there, but also ownership, right? Like there has to be ownership. There's no one that's going to care more about your marketing success than you. It doesn't matter how much you give them. You can pay a marketing director $10,000 a month. And that doesn't mean that that person is going to care more about your marketing than you. Now, you might get lucky and you might find somebody brilliant who's super smart. But at the end of the day, and I'm learning this with finances, too, is like I need to check everything, you know, to a certain degree. That's what we got into when we get into business. That's what we're up to, like to go to that mark, to go to that marketing meeting, to go to that finance meeting, to actually pay attention, to make sure that if there is something that needs to be nudged in a different direction, that we nudge it. Because no one's going to care more about my marketing than me. No one's going to care more about my money than me. That's basically what's hard for people to fully appreciate because we think money should solve that. We think money. And like we're talking about some pretty big businesses, right, that are spending quite a bit of money. Yeah. A lot of times we're talking to them and. It doesn't mean the problem is fixed because you throw money at it. And that's just a hard lesson to learn. And I've spent a lot of money to try to learn that lesson myself.

Yeah, I think that, you know, just like you said, there are some times where you have a great employee, right, that like just does it how it's supposed to be done. If you haven't had that feeling before, I... Strongly recommend it. It feels great having those people in your company. And there's like, as we've gone on, we've had more and more of those people that just get it done right and get it done at the top. But to a certain degree, you got to remember that you're special, that you have a unique perspective and that you have your best interests in mind and you have the most context out of anyone. Including a coach, Brad, and I know you do coaching, so I don't want to be disrespectful there. Oh,100%. You have to trust yourself. You have the most context on your situation. A coach, I'm just like saying in my case, I've always appreciated that coaches give me accountability for things I said previously. They challenge me. But at the end of the day, I need to make these decisions. I need to take responsibility and I need to check what I inspect, what I expect. I think that those things, just recognizing a little bit that you're special and that you have that unique perspective that probably got this business to where it is and to respect yourself for that and to check in and just give that context. I have like. 10 employees now that work for me that are like really, really like they're on it. Everything's usually correct and just like, like perfect. Right now I have 30 some employees that I have 10 that are like that. Right. That are just, but it's still, if I don't go and give them the context of everything else I've got, cause no one has more context in our business than us as the owner. Usually like I remember things. Eight years ago when I just started that like probably are important and I forget to say them and repeat them back to my employees that like helped us get where we are now. And it's just kind of like always kind of chief repeater. I've heard somebody call like the chief CEO that you just have to keep repeating stuff a lot and not get too tired of it. And I think part of that is context of just giving all this context to the people. And that's also another great reason of like why it's ideal if you can keep people for longer. Like I have goals in my company of like keeping people for longer because then you keep on retaining the context. Yeah. Which I think helps business go better is when there's more context of like what we've already tried and failed that and tried again.

Oh, that's real.

Yeah. How can I help on that?

That is interesting for sure. If I had to choose one at this exact moment in culture and like what's going on on social media and stuff like that. Oh man, that's a tough one, Brad. I, it would be a fierce battle between like in-person networking and events and video marketing.

Social media and video. Like basically like, honestly, even if it was just video on social, like. reels and YouTube videos. So those would be battling it out. The reason I go back to in-person and events stuff, like when I started BNI, I didn't have a big marketing budget at all when I first started, just barely had any money at all. And I went out to lunch with people for every day for a month. I took somebody to lunch. So my marketing budget was taking people to lunch. Gotcha. And asking for referrals and trying to refer, right? So like going to events, going to things that were cheap, meetups, all that type of stuff. Trying to get on stage, like that's another thing is like trying to get on stage and speak about something, even though I wasn't, you know, I was only four years into my career or whatever at that time. Like I got on stage and it was good for my business. So that versus video, I think I might have to do that one. Just because I technically believe that's what like the in-person stuff, I think, even though it doesn't like always get categorized at marketing, I think it might be some people might consider that like sales. I think that edge with in-person stuff and hand-to-hand combat and like I think about for contractors, like anything you can do in person, you can go to. music festivals, there's like a country music festival, you can set up a booth. If you could include networking and events in one lumped thing, I think I would have to say, I think that that might be the top one. Just because I think if you did that well and you did nothing else, I bet you your business would still do great.

to the show. I agree totally. I think anything with Google business profiles, moneymaker for contractors, definitely like if you take that very seriously, if you get it, you know, I think that that's a very high leverage marketing activity. I just had to like, kind of like think about what I thought was like the most leads you could get a thing that's in-person networking. But I think digitally Google business profile reviews. It can also be used all over social media, right? So if you have a template or even if you screenshot, you know what I've been finding too? If you screenshot just like a text message from a customer that's really nice, that type of thing feels very authentic and you can just put that straight up screenshot onto your stories or a picture on Facebook or whatever. I think anything with pushing the reviews, pushing the reviews on the internet, But yeah, Google Business Profile and a great tip is that Google Business Profile, what dirty little secret is that it's actually a social media platform and that you can post Google Business posts and photos to your business profile. And that's actually good for your ranking on Google Maps. So that doesn't say that, you know what I mean? They had, I can't remember what their. Google Plus or whatever back in the day that was.

It died, right? It died, but did it or did some of that stuff just get transferred into Google business profile and actually Google is trying to kind of create that as like it's social media kind of platform in a weird way. If you treat it like that, it's really good for your Google map. So like that's something I absolutely agree. And I'd kind of like raise you. photos, and Google business profile posts. To me, if you can do those three things all the time, it's really good for your Google ranking on Maps.

Two quick ways, like if people are like, how do I get this? I like there's a method of essentially at the front end of a job saying, hey, this is our five-star process. And if there's anything that I'm doing to this thing that I could be doing better that wouldn't allow us to get five stars, I'd love it if you'd let me know so that I can earn that five-star at the end of that. Basically, future pacing for the customer to help. them think about that on the front end and then let you know if there is something that you could improve and so that's one way another way is contests between you and your reps if you have like a bunch of different people then you can do a contest leaderboard well i've found that works a lot like very well for our company of like and i've seen it work for like different types of contractors too of like they people get excited. You can do like a cash prize. You can, if you get this many or the person with the most gets a thousand bucks or something like that, like it's very motivating. You don't need to make it one, you know, like one month you can make like three, you know, a quarter or whatever. It's definitely a big, from what I've seen, it really pushes reviews. It's like, you can't pay the customer for the reviews, but you can, you can pay your reps for pushing on them.

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Oh, on the lawful side, I want to throw out here the tell them to mention them by name. So if you're doing that contest. If you say, hey, if you don't mind mentioning me by name, it actually increases the percentage chances of them leaving a review. So, and like that, you'll see that with like a bunch, like your competitors, you'll see like, James did a great job on the windows or whatever, you know, like that's because it increases the chances. It's like, you can do that as part of the contest, but it's also like, to me, I don't care really if they mentioned the rep. I just know psychologically. That as a homeowner or a reviewer of any type, it's just compelling to be like, oh, I want to help. You don't always want to help a company, but you want to help a person, right? Right. I think that that's the thing to leverage there.

The first one?

Like sometimes like if you let's say you have your uniform on, you know, like a nice like collared shirt with the logo and then you've got your. jeans or your khakis or whatever you get i i've seen like home service businesses with like the little uh the little plastic thing with just the qr code they're like it's their name tag but on the back it has the qr code and it's like if you don't mind you know it's like the the little string thing that kind of extends um if you don't mind scanning this and you know like if you feature paste right you've let the them know that that's what you're aiming at by the end of the service and they also said If you got the agreement that they were going to tell you if you weren't meeting that. And this isn't like a new strategy. I've seen this like a bunch of people use it. So it appears to work.

Yeah, all kind of has to get probably role played a little bit. So everyone's keeping it kind of like wholesome and positive. I think like, yeah, I can see what you're saying. It could create a little animosity if not done genuinely.

Like, yeah, I think that there's like a opportunity for just like a question, right? Like at that point to say, is there anything that we could have done better or. Like, you know, like I think that that's what's good about review culture, because this is a change in culture, right? Like this isn't, it hasn't always been this way. Service providers 10, let's say 30 years ago, let's go 30 years ago, didn't have as much checks and balances to like even want a five-star review. They were just, sometimes they're just like, F you. You know what I mean? Like, and like, frankly, we wish we could do that to this day sometimes, right? As service providers. It is a good development in culture, I think, that we're all trying to get a five-star review. And so that gives this end of the conversation or end of a service or end of whatever. There is a good moment there where you can say, is there anything we could have done better? Because I want to continue to improve our service. And then if you get to the end of those things, because there's always a couple of things maybe. then you can ask after that too. I think that there's an opportunity. And also there's like, also as a service provider, as a contractor, I think it's also to say, sometimes I'm not going to ask. Sometimes I know that's the bad part of automations too, is like maybe every job doesn't need a nice job at the end. You know, maybe sometimes we're just happy to get through this job and get somewhat paid and get out with our, with our, like our.

Yeah, SEO is half of our revenue. So it's a big service for us. Like I think what's, you know, with a lot of different agencies, it kind of gets tacked on, you know, it's kind of an add on like, oh yeah, we could also do your SEO. We're doing your ads and that's where all the leads are coming from. But SEO, yeah, we could do it. So then they charge enough to like get the recurring. I think this is our original service, you know, with websites, website design and SEO. So it's. pretty aggressive because for a long time we didn't have Google ads. So we had to get leads with SEO or else we got kicked. So we were creating leads with SEO, just SEO. And then we've added on Google ads. We've added on Google maps SEO. So like I was talking about the photos getting added. And like we do review responses with AI and then we do like Google business profile posting. And those things are all what helps you rank higher on Google. And that's and we do an initial optimization and kind of like we have. But yeah, that service is fairly new, but we're excited about it because I think Google Maps is extremely important. And then we do LSA. But to me, I'm like, I don't even know why you needed an agency to do LSA. It's so simple. I think you should just do it yourself. We have a course on our website, hookagency. com slash LSA to just do it yourself. Almost what we offer that is like to make sure people are doing it. Like we want our clients to be doing LSA. If they're not, we highly recommend it in most areas.

Yeah, that's our OG. That's our main one.

Number one thing to be doing, if nothing else is the location landing pages and making sure that your key service pages have really good, like targeting, like what are we, what keywords is it going after the meta titles, the descriptions and stuff like that. We do keyword research. We do competitive analysis. That's just figuring out what people are Googling. And trying to make more content about those things that they're Googling, really. It's like, that's what we want. We want the content of your website to just keep on spidering out. So you have hundreds and hundreds of pages that are about the things that you sell that people can find you. And usually those are like geolocation things. And then additionally, yes, blogging is part of our strategy to create authority and traffic on the website. All of that is harder now than it was five years ago by far. Because we all, it's like being in a fight where everyone is on steroids. Because think about AI and how much that scaled our ability to throw out content super quick. So we doubled our content because we use AI too. And I think it's just, it's not even like, it still feels like it's a little less than, I want to always be doing more because it's, It's just we're swimming in content now. So it's harder. It's a harder fight than it's ever been. I started SEO 10 plus years ago on my site, and it was way easier to cut through back then. It was a little just blogging about stuff back in the day. I would be able to cut through way quicker. Now it's just, like I said, we're in a fight where everyone's on steroids.

Yeah. I would say on the first part of what you're saying about like marketers just. If the button is there to press the button and you get money, I will be first in line to press that button over and over and over and over again. You know what I mean? So I am part of that.

Back in the day, like when I say back in the day, I'm talking like 2017 and 2018. Like now that's almost back in the day now. We're talking about seven, eight, seven years ago. SEO and, you know, I remember with sitting around with my. I had two SEOs at the time, right? We're sitting around and like, there's this new thing. It was FAQ schema for SEO. It was like, and as soon as you put it in, there's like questions on the bottom of blog posts and landing pages. And you added the schema that the code, it would show up. You could index it to search console and it would immediately show up. So now your thing went from that, that tall to three times as tall. So, and you could actually like put call to actions in the questions. It was like, I don't know if you remember that there's all these questions underneath posts and guys like me and my fellow SEO nerds ruined that probably because we did that for everything for a while. It's like, but every time there is something like that, it's just exciting for us SEO nerds or us marketers is like, we're going to. I just, I think from my point of view, it's like my worldview is that you should take every conceivable advantage for your small business. And like, it's, it's your responsibility to take every conceivable ethical advantage that you possibly can. And now that doesn't go into the scammer mindset, but it's like, right. If it's ethical and you can get more business from it, if I wouldn't. Yeah, then press that button over and over and over again until that Google says turn it off.

That's funny. So I have a client remodeling client from back in the day that I helped grow. And he did. Eventually I coached him to not work with us because I knew that he didn't want to hire and he wasn't gonna. And I think I love that guy. I'm having him remodel my bathroom. I mean, he's the man. He cares about his customers. He's a good guy. I personally am greedy and I want to grow my business, even if it hurts. So I might be neurotic. You know what I mean? So maybe that person that we're talking about, they might be healthier than you and I. If they're cool with a five-person business, I respect it. It doesn't make sense to be super crazy aggressive if you can only handle three jobs this week. I mean, that's why everyone loves that marketer question. Can you handle 15 more? Yeah. Oh,

I know you guys all love that. So I'll send that in the DM to you later. But it is relevant, right? It's real. You have to understand your capacity. And if you're willing to grow now, I would encourage you. to want to grow because I think there's new challenges in creating a business that like has structure to it. That's built out and could work without you. Like, I think it's, it's a worthwhile adventure to try to build that. But I, um, I also want to say like, I've seen it and I'm not mad at that guy. You know what I mean? Like, I'm not mad at that guy.

I agree. And I think it's like, it kind of doesn't make sense to sit there doing a ton of marketing. If you're in that situation, maybe get like a high school or like a college, like marketer intern to just do the fancy Facebook stuff. Yeah. But it's not, it's just not going to be necessary. And at that point it's kind of for your ego, you know, like if you're. It depends on, like you said, different types of trades. But is there a remodeler or a handyman or certain types of... If you're booked out six months, you don't need marketing. You know what I mean? You don't need to sit there doing all this that hardcore. So you have to figure out what's your real capacity. I've always said this. There's ups and downs, right? So you want to have enough. You have to recognize that six months is not six months forever. Just because you're built out six months does not. And we're coming into that mode right now where there's been a little bit more tightness in remodeling. And I don't know if that continues, but it feels like at that point, you got to recognize once you're down to three months out, maybe it is time to get a little bit more professional on the market. And we have remodelers, but I'm saying like, you got to know what staff levels you're willing to grow to.

And make sure you get your phone stuff right. Like I think like, like that's such a big deal. Like if you tell me you don't have any leads, but. I look through your forms and you haven't responded to people for a week. And you're like, I listen to phone calls of clients, but like, even like people that are spending money on marketing, a lot of times the call it's like we've got somebody that's rude on the phone or you're not answering the phone and not answering the phone is probably the biggest thing is like, make sure some of those things around and supporting marketing are there. Otherwise it's very weird to be spending a lot of money on marketing.

Thank you very much. Yeah. It's at hookagency. com, hookagency all over social media. And I'm very, very grateful to be on here. And thank you for taking the time to chat with me.

I'm currently listening to an audible, I'm listening to unreasonable hospitality. Um, it's from the, the perspective of like a restaurant business owner about like basically all the crazy, unreasonably hospitable things that they do for their customers. Cause it's a very high end restaurant. Um, but it's just kind of a, it's, it's got a lot of. general business application to like, is there anything else we could be doing to kind of level up the way our customers feel?

Thank you very, very much.