Austin Gray: [Applause] Hey, welcome back to another episode of the OWNR OPS podcast! I'm your host, Austin Gray, and in this episode, I'm hosting Andy Walker again from Striker Digital. This week, I had a listener ask me, "Hey, I would love to use your website, guys, but I've already paid a deposit to another designer, so what 5 to 15 bullet points do I need to give them as a checklist to make sure that they are creating me a website that will convert well?"

So, if you're in a similar situation, listen to this episode with Andy. Andy's going to go over six sections of your website that you must have in order to convert leads at a high conversion rate.

If you are looking to get a service business website built, don't hesitate to use the link in the show notes to visit Striker Digital's website. Fair warning, I do get compensated for this because I recommend them, but I'm only recommending people who I have vetted—people who have gotten me results in my business, Bearclaw Land Services. Andy and Bod have literally got me to number one in the state from an SEO perspective.

If you have not already signed up for the newsletter, go do that because we will be sending an emailed summary of these bullet points tomorrow. We send these out on Saturdays, and these episodes drop every week on Fridays. I'm wearing the shirt today, so if any of you guys want a shirt, send me an email, tell me what you like, tell me what you don't like, tell me how we can do better, and recommend a guest. Then leave us a 5-star review on Apple or Spotify, and I'll send you a free OWNR OPS shirt!

Alright, how about that? Let's jump into the episode.

Austin Gray: Welcome back to another episode of the OWNR OPS podcast! I'm your host, Austin Gray, and I've got Andy Walker joining us again for the second time. Andy's joining us this time because we've had some requests from people reaching out about marketing services and what they need to do on their website. So, Andy, welcome back to the show!

Andy Walker: Awesome! Thanks, Austin. Can't keep me away! I'm going to come on a third time too. I'll be back again.

Austin Gray: So, let's just use a real-time example here. Last week, for those of you who've been listening to the podcast, you guys know that we're running some paid ads, very similar to what we did for Bearclaw with my partner, Josh Joseph. We're doing that for other land clearing and excavation companies. A guy came to the sales funnel and was asking about his website. I always point people to Bod and Andy because they are crushing it for us on the SEO front.

His main question was, "Okay, I've already put a deposit down with a designer. I've got somebody else building my website. What are the 5 to 15 bullet points that I need to make sure that they do to create a good building block?" So, that leads us to this conversation.

Andy Walker: Yeah, so I think really you can break down a website into three parts. When you're going to build a website, you need to focus on three things: your SEO, conversion rate optimization, and user experience. You want to make sure—like, you know, the whole point of doing SEO is to drive traffic to the website to become leads and customers. If you're driving traffic to the website and they're not becoming leads and customers, then you're not getting a return on your investment. That's the entire function of any marketing campaign that you run.

User experience is the third one, but user experience and conversion optimization really play hand-in-hand in my opinion.

The way I think about this—before we even dive into really maybe more higher-level topics—is something I think a lot about. If you're a consumer on the internet and you go to an e-commerce store online, you're going to buy a shirt, shorts, a wallet—whatever you're going to buy. You know, you have an expectation of the experience you're going to have on that website, of what it's going to look like, how you're going to navigate from the category of men's to women's, how you're going to filter by t-shirts and things like that, right? You know, when you go to Amazon, you expect to have a certain experience.

So, I really think when you're building websites, you need to understand, you know, your users on the other end. They're not sophisticated thinking about it in that nature, but subconsciously, that's going in the background of their mind. When they land on a website and it's just not anything that they would expect, you know, it may not be a bad thing—but like there's a similar structure and standard across all types of websites for home service businesses.

You know, it's not the sexiest thing in the world—it's structure. You have your value proposition, you need to capture their contact information, and things like that. So that's like the first thing I think about. You don't need to invest thousands and thousands of dollars into this really extravagant website. Oftentimes, when we see people do this and they come to work with us for SEO, we often just have to go in and change a lot anyway.

So something that's always disappointing for us is when someone comes to us and they want to do SEO, and they're like, "Oh, I'm having my website built." I'm like, "Oh, crap, great." You know? Because now when you come in, there's a lot of additional work. I know we're just going to have to go in and make a lot of changes, you know, right off the start.

Austin Gray: Yeah, and why is that? I'm curious.

Andy Walker: I think web development and SEO are separate skills. I mean, if you're doing web design, you should have a base understanding of what SEO is. But you know, one of the challenging parts is finding a balance because you do need to find a balance between your brand and SEO. A straight-up SEO website would just be, you know, your keywords—very bland, not really good engaging copy and things like that. I mean, you can blend them together, but the guys that are just web designers are really great at just creating the brand presence, the design, and things like that. But they don't necessarily have the knowledge of, you know, we need to have each page internally linked in this nature. We need to have service cards that represent each service and go to every single page. We make sure all of those pages are also linked in the footer and the primary navigation.

What I'm getting into when I'm talking about the internal linking is just, if you're on a website and you want to see an additional service that somebody offers—let's do a cleaning company for example, right? You know they have just standard house cleaning or they have deep cleaning. You want to learn more about what entails in deep cleaning, so you're going to click through to that page. You just want to have multiple places where people can find that page—for user experience because they need to easily navigate it. If not, they're just going to bounce really quickly.

But a big factor for SEO and having the internal linking between the pages is that, what's going to happen is you take your website, create a sitemap, and your sitemap just shows like all the URLs—all the pages you have on your website—and you submit that to Google Search Console. And when you submit that to Google Search Console, you're effectively having them crawl the website to learn about the content, understand the pages, and then get them indexed. The definition of indexed would be actually showing on the search engine because a lot of people have a lot of content built on their website, but it's not indexed. It's not actually doing anything for you; it's just kind of a hobby at that point.

The better internal linking structure that you have will allow Google to crawl your website and navigate to each page. If they can't navigate to each page, they can't crawl that page and understand it. I mean, you did give them the URL on the sitemap, but from personal experience, when you do have that proper internal linking structure, your pages are going to get indexed much faster. You know, that's really the goal because step one is just getting them to show on the search engine. Before you're ranking in the top three or anything, you just simply have to have them live on the search engine.

Austin Gray: If you are a land clearing, excavation, grading, or snow removal contractor, check out LandServMarketers.com. LSM is the same growth agency I've used to grow Bearclaw Land Services from zero to over seven figures in revenue. We've created a seamless process for owner operators to upload photos and videos from the field, and LSM will do all the heavy lifting for you on the back end. They'll do all the editing, all the publishing, all the social media management, and they'll run your paid ads to bring you more leads so that you can close more high-ticket jobs. Check out LandServMarketers.com.

So, I had a friend who is starting a construction company, and he reached out to me. He's like, "Hey, who built your website?" And I was like, "Well, I did initially, and then I hired an agency, like a pro, to do it." Why shouldn't somebody build their own website if they don't have all this technical know-how and experience?

Andy Walker: Really, I think it's going to be just more expensive in the long run—and maybe that expense isn't felt tangibly; like you don't actually see money leaving your account, but it's like the opportunity cost of doing it yourself. One, your time investment should probably be spent better by generating more business to allow you to produce more cash flow and then invest it into professionals who can provide the service for you. If you've never done it before, you don't know what works. You just simply don't know what works and what's going to convert somebody from traffic to a lead.

Just like we talked about with all of the internal linking strategies, what's going to happen is you're going to invest a lot of time to do it. It's going to be frustrating. You would think it would be easier in 2024 than it is, but it still involves a lot of technical knowledge to actually do it. It's that opportunity cost. You build a website, and it's up there—that's great—and you might have some traffic coming to it. It's not SEO optimized by any means. You probably used a very lackluster page builder, and you're just not going to get the customers that you want. Then, you know, you're going to spend three months in that process doing all that. Just to eventually, you're going to end up giving up and just pay somebody to do it. So it's just much simpler to just pay up front and do it.

I mean, not even from a website perspective, but like I just take that same stance within our business. You know, if there's something that I need done—for example, I was having a custom dashboard with some complex automations built for us. It's like I could probably do this, and I probably could figure it out, or I could just cut through all the crap and just have someone do it for me. Yes, thanks, I got to pay money, but it's going to be done right. It's going to be perfect. You know, it's going to last me for the duration and do everything. It's going to have all the correct functions to do everything I want.

I can tell you from experience—like in my past businesses, that was one of my roles that I brought to the business—was like, "Oh, I'm going to build and manage the website." And yes, I learned how to use WordPress, Webflow...I started—I'm embarrassed to say, but I started the very first one with Wix, right?

And everybody always asks, "Why wouldn't I just build my own website with Wix?" What you were saying about the indexing and this internal linking structure and submitting the sitemap to Google—it's like, if you're a beginner in web design and you go build something on Wix, like one, you probably haven't even heard of internal linking structure, don't know what a sitemap is, right? You don't even know that you need to index your site on Google.

And this is why I have loved working with you guys so much because, like, you guys picked a service and you've gone headfirst into it. You know it in and out. I'm going to tell you guys—and this is why I'm such a big proponent of Andy and Bod—and fair disclaimer, like they pay me an affiliate fee. You know, if I refer somebody to them, I don't refer people just because I get paid. I refer people because we're building a brand here in public, and I know Andy and Bod are going to deliver results.

They're delivering results because they are experts in it. And so it's like if I refer people to you guys, that just helps build the OWNR OPS brand because people who listen to this podcast are going to have a great experience; they're going to get leads on the SEO side, which then in turn helps the OWNR OPS brand. So that's why I enjoy working with you guys.

The sitemap thing—like building your own website—you're so right about the opportunity cost. Sure, you can go spend two, three, four, or five days however long it takes you to like hack together a website on Wix or Webflow or WordPress or whatever, but if you don't know how to do the technical stuff, it's like having a useless website if it's not generating leads.

Andy Walker: Yeah, in software they call something similar to this tech debt. So basically, if somebody wrote—if you were building software and somebody wrote a bunch of bad code and it was undocumented; no one truly knew how it worked, then it's a massive time and money commitment to have somebody come in and optimize that and fix it.

And so what we'll see a lot of times is somebody, they'll have a website, or maybe someone built it a long time ago. It's on an older tech stack that not a lot of modern-day web developers use. They're like, "I really need to get off this. I can't use this. I can't deal with this." But the thing is, what your website is live for a period of time, you're generating traffic and ranking. When you go and build a new website, you're going to submit a new sitemap to the website.

So we just saw this happen. One of our clients, we do their SEO, and we didn't receive any contact information about this. Their web developers were going to redesign their website, and they just did it. This was a website that was getting probably 500 to a thousand clicks every single month—it fell off a cliff instantly. So this wasn't even a new website, they just redesigned the website but changed all of the existing content on the website.

So all the primary keywords that we were targeting were all changed. This isn't the first time I've seen this happen. So like this is just an instance of that tech debt because yes, naturally like you are going to want to upgrade with modern times. You know, as like if you built a website five years ago, there's a different user experience and type of feel from those websites five years ago versus the expectations of a user today. Naturally, you are going to want to progress that, but there's a right way and wrong way to do it.

When you do it wrong the first time and you have to reset everything and do it right the first time, you're going to run into that issue of if you're getting 1,000 clicks to your website every single month, it goes down to 200. Likely, the outcome is that you're going to get less leads and you're going to get less customers because 800 less people per month are going to be on your website. You know, and that's really the goal in its entirety.

And another thing that I think when you're doing it yourself is a lot of times like for keyword research, you don't have to be super complex about it. If you do junk removal, people are probably just searching for junk removal. Right? Like that's probably going to be your primary keyword.

But we just had an instance recently with somebody who does artificial turf installation. The initial website was optimized for that search term, but within their area, there was a 50 or 60% change difference—people search for artificial grass installation, not turf. They use the term grass, so everything was built around that instead of turf.

That's just like one simple mistake when you just don't know what you're doing. You're accidentally optimizing for the wrong thing when you know it could have just been done right the first time by a professional. It just saved you all the time and opportunity cost alongside that.

Andy Walker: Yeah, it's pretty funny because when we started into the business, I thought I knew what I was going to go after, but then we did the research for the search volume on the SEO, and it's like, "Oh, we need to optimize for land clearing!" Like that's what people are actually searching for. So whenever you bring the SEO perspective, you can actually do the research that will help you craft your website—like you were just saying. And man, that could make or break it for that client, right?

Austin Gray: Yeah, and something that I think too is like as a business owner, you get used to the terminology that you use. So residential roofing or house repaint—where you just like repaint a home. But it's just like from two perspectives: one from an SEO perspective and also when somebody gets onto your page and they see "house repaint," I was like, "You know, I'm your potential customer right now."

And you're saying "house repaint," and I'm thinking to myself, "What does that necessarily entail? What does that mean?" Where if you just said "house painting," it's like, "Yeah, that's exactly what I'm looking for! I'm looking to get my house painted." You don't have to say, "house repaint," even because that's the terminology that they were using inside their own business and their industry. I'm like, "But the average consumer, you know, they don't know that."

And then as it goes, a lot of people really want to optimize for commercial. "I want commercial work; I want commercial work." And the thing is, the same search terms apply. So not that many people are searching for "commercial cleaning company" or "commercial roofing company." They just are going to search for "roofing company" and then find out when they land on your website if you do commercial roofing.

And you know, I don't think I've ever worked with a roofer who doesn't do commercial roofs ever. So I don't think there's necessarily a reason to, you know, like completely go all in on commercial versus residential. It's just roofing as a whole. You know, that's what you want to rank for.

If a dentist needs their office clean, they're probably not looking for "dental office cleaners near me." It's just cleaning companies because it's just like a skill that people can—anybody can do, right? You can clean! You can clean!

And maybe I'm wrong on this. Maybe you'd have like a roofing client who would completely disagree with me. But like from the land clearing or excavation side, it's like a builder doesn't call us and ask if we do commercial excavation. It's like, "Do you do excavation? Do you do government excavation?" It's like we just do excavation. If you've got a government project, yes! If you're paying in U.S. dollars or Bitcoin, we're showing up!

Andy Walker: Yeah, I totally agree. I have a couple of other points that I want to hit on early so people definitely get this through their heads from the conversion standpoint of things.

So the reality is a lot of people are going to land on your website, and they're going to bounce off immediately. We have one client who's national, and they use a software—I think it’s Hotjar; it might be something similar—but you can see user behavior patterns on your website. It's really only useful when you're getting a lot of traffic. It's going to be hard to have a lot of insight if you don't get that much traffic to make a statistically significant decision based off of it.

But the data that he collected showed us that 80% of the people don't scroll past the hero section on a website. The hero section is the first thing you see when you open a website. It's like, "Hey, this is the service we provide in this area. This is our value proposition." You probably have a big image in the background or something of that nature.

80% of the people that came to his website did not scroll past that. So the point that I'm making here is you have to make it really frictionless for people to get your contact information and for them to give you their contact information.

So what you should do is you should also optimize for mobile and desktop in this because what's going to happen is you’re going to get a decent amount of desktop traffic, and if all of your buttons just say “call now,” that's great! But if someone's on a PC, they're not going to be able to just call you. You know, they're going to hit "call now," and it's going to try and open a FaceTime browser or something like that, and they're just going to be confused and bounce off the page.

So you should definitely at least have your phone number listed in front of their eyes that they can see right away, or even in your call now button. Instead of having "call now," there you could just have the phone number with a phone symbol in that call-to-action button.

And then so that's typically on the left side of the page. You'll see the big heading one text where you'll include your keywords for SEO in there as well. You have your calls to action, maybe insert some social proof like "120+ 5-star Google reviews" that you'll add in there or a trust badge. Or if you have a special certification, you might want to show that there because it gives people trust and confidence in you.

So even if they don't realize it—like a "100% satisfaction guarantee" badge—if they see that subconsciously, they're already building trust when they see badges like that or a Google-guaranteed badge or you know, “I'm a verified partner” or “insured”—whatever it is, include social proof there as well. Because remember, a lot of people aren't going to make it past this section, so you’re trying to prove yourself.

You're trying to build trust and credibility as fast as possible.

Then on the right side, I highly, highly, highly recommend to have a form there. And that form should be name, email, phone—that's it. Literally nothing more! Every single incremental step—there’s two buckets you can be in for this: so every incremental step that you have, if you're asking a lot of information, especially like someone’s home address, not everybody's necessarily willing to give that up immediately.

But every incremental step that you add in there, the less people you're going to get to submit the form. Some people look at that as a positive because the only leads that are going to come through are going to be highly qualified because they're willing to give all that information, which is good. But my preference would be just name, email, phone—make it super simple! It's going to take them less than 30 seconds to input that information. Then you capture that, and you can put your sales process into play.

Maybe they're unqualified or maybe they're a price shopper and they're not ready now, but you have that information and you can store that information in your CRM. You can retarget them in multiple different ways. You know, you could have an SMS campaign for a later July 4th sale, or an email campaign towards them if you're doing paid ads on Facebook. You could use that type of information to create a lookalike audience in Facebook ads as well.

So there's a lot of value to just getting contact information too because, you know, this was already an interested prospect. They're showing interest in your service by giving you their contact information. Therefore, not everyone’s going to buy, but the probability that they buy from you in the future is much higher than somebody who has never been to your website or ever heard of you before.

So I think it's really beneficial to have that form in the hero section. And especially like if we were running Google ads for somebody—never, ever do I want to not have that because the standard procedure is you have a contact form at the bottom of your website. What we see is that form in the hero section—because remember, not many people are going to scroll past that section—has way more submissions than the contact form at the bottom of the screen or any other, you know, call to action throughout there. That form is going to work really, really well.

But those are like major points I want to hit: show your phone number, make it visible. So if someone's on desktop, they can't call you from desktop, but they can just type it into their phone and call you. You know, that's going to be really beneficial for you. And then that form, recommended: make it as frictionless as possible.

So that was a ton of information, and I love it! You hit the nail on the head in so many different areas.

Let’s break this down as a recap. So let’s define the hero section. What’s the hero section?

Andy Walker: Yeah, so it's just the major portion of the website. So basically, right when you land on a website, you don't even have to scroll at all, you're already seeing the hero section. So you'll see that navigation at the top typically and then that section where you're going to have a picture of say you and your team, and you're going to say, “Andy, top-rated pest control company in Fort Lauderdale” or something like that will be your heading. You'll have a little subtext below it, adding more to your value proposition.

But that heading there in that hero section, that big bold text—that is also very, very important for SEO. So you want to optimize for your primary keywords and your location in that because this goes back to when I was talking about submitting the website in the Google Search Console. When they crawl over that, the heading one tag is going to be a primary indicator for what your content is about.

Austin Gray: And that’s important because they need to understand the relevancy of the content that you're creating. If you say you do pest control but you're trying to win terms for plumbing, Google’s just not going to have any understanding of that at all. Their job is to show relevant searches to the users on their platform because if they didn't do that, people simply wouldn't use Google.

If they didn’t feel like they could just go on Google and search for a plumbing company and find relevant searches, right? So they have to optimize for relevancy; they also have to optimize for trust, which is a different conversation as it relates to SEO.

Andy Walker: Basically everything—I’ll keep this short—but everything that you do in SEO, the backlinks, the reviews, the content that you build, they’re literally just to fill those two pillars of relevancy and trust. That's what it’s all about because Google has to absolutely make sure that they're providing relevant searches to businesses that they know that they can trust to put in front of their audience.

Austin Gray: So let's use a real-world example. Andy, let's take "Denver roofing company." Right? If you're going to start a roofing company in Denver, what is your H1 going to be right now for the SEO?

Andy Walker: Yeah, so probably the top search result or the most searched keywords by volume is probably literally going to be "roofing company." Probably! It's very broad; it's general. Remember, you're dealing with the general public here. Not everybody's super sophisticated about the searches that they make.

So the primary search volume, let’s say, is roofing company, and you’re trying to communicate to Google that you provide the service in a location. So you’re going to be the most trusted roofing company in Denver. You know, and then you can just think of like multiple variations of that of however you want to brand yourself. But you're just definitely going to make sure that you use the term "roofing company" and "Denver" in your heading one tag.

However else you want to organize it, whatever variation is absolutely fine, but you just want to make sure you definitely have that in there.

Austin Gray: And let’s take a step back real quick for anybody listening to this who is completely unfamiliar with the term SEO. The reason why he's saying you want to use "roofing" and "Denver" is because having a search engine optimized website means that your website is relevant to what users are searching for.

So kind of going back to what Andy was saying before, you're using "roofing" and you're using the term "Denver," so the service you provide and the area you provide it, we're putting that in the H1. Now let's go to the subtext. Like, every website—or most professionally designed websites—have this subtext below the H1. So what are you using there under your heading one tag?

Andy Walker: There, you're going to include a value proposition—something with social proof that highlights why your company should be trusted, your experience, things of that nature.

So a prime example of that would be, "With over 50 years in the roofing industry, our team is ready to answer your questions and address your concerns. We know you will be absolutely thrilled with the finished product."

And in there, if you offer multiple services that you really want people to know about without making it too lengthy—you know, you want only one or two sentences in this segment—you also want to include that in there. Because if you have a highly specialized service that you know people need, you can also include that in there. If you're a plumber and there's one specific thing that you're really the best at and people typically come to you because not many other people can fulfill on that specific service, you're going to highlight that in there as well.

Austin Gray: So you've got the H1; you've got the supporting copy to sort of further state your value prop. Then you mentioned social proof. Can you break that down a little bit further?

Andy Walker: So you want to highlight things—third-party evidence—because with anything that you do in marketing, if you've ever gotten a referral, you understand how strong a third-party signal is.

So when somebody else had a great experience with you and they say, "You know, Austin provided an exceptional service; he was super responsible; his team was so polite," you realize that when that person comes to you, you almost just have to not mess up to close that deal at that point, right?

Because somebody that they really trust is vouching for you and giving you trust. So you want to highlight things of that nature. If you have a lot of 5-star Google reviews, you're going to input that there.

If you have a 5-star rating on Facebook, if you’re accredited by the BBB—things of that nature. If you were highlighted on a local news network that everybody knows about, you can have an "as featured in" section—"As featured in the Denver Times." You know, I don’t know if that's a news network there, but you get the point.

Because typically what you're communicating to the people is that if you're featured in something, of that nature you’re trusted at that point. So you’re constantly throughout the entire page—not even just in the hero section—you’re consistently trying to build trust.

We’ve used Better Business Bureau. One thing we’ve used on ours is even just like a screenshot of your 5-star rating on Google. Like, I went and just took a screenshot of our average rating and then posted that there.

Austin Gray: And so to be clear for our listeners here, you want to position that above the fold, correct? Like ideally where your customers can see that without having to scroll on the website?

Andy Walker: Absolutely correct. And you know, that's the term I was looking for when we were describing what the hero section is. It’s everything above the fold. It's before a user scrolls. And like I mentioned, you know, from some data that we've seen, 80% of people don’t leave that.

So that's where you’re really going to win the customer in that. So like everything that's the most engaging and the most important that you want to highlight is going to be above the fold.

Austin Gray: And I would assume the reason that that is is because we're just so busy as Americans, right? It's like everybody's busy. When you need something, you're searching for it, you click on it. If it looks professional, if they don't have to scroll, if they can input their contact information right there without having to scroll, then a lot of people will do that!

Andy Walker: So can you take us to that next piece? Is there anything else before we get to the contact form that you want to cover in the hero section?

Austin Gray: No, I think we hit it all on the head there. It's going to be, you know, including your keywords in that heading tag, your value position in that sub-copy below that. You’re going to have your social proof and your calls to actions where you highlight your phone number, give them a secondary button—maybe to submit a form, and maybe that'll take them to that bottom contact form section.

But you'll typically be fine with just one call to action, which is "call now," because if you follow the standard that we're working off of, you're going to have the form right beside it. So a call now that highlights your phone number, your social proof, any evidence is going to be absolutely perfect.

And then the form—how are you structuring that—or how do you like to see that structured if somebody else is designing it?

Andy Walker: It's going to be like a rectangle, right? And at the top of the form, right before your inputs, it’s going to be another value add to the customer. So what am I going to get out of me giving you my contact information?

So this might be "Schedule your free roof inspection," or "Get a free estimate today." Or you can even add some scarcity into it, which is a topic I want to talk about later for capturing lead information. You know, you could have a countdown timer on there, like “48 hours left; get 20% off your first house washing” for a pressure washer or something of that nature.

You can add in other variables like scarcity to engage people to give you their contact information. So it's really not going to be that big, not that loud or anything like that, but it's going to be another value proposition.

You’re going to ask for their name, email, phone number, a submit button, and even below that submit button, you could have the Google logo there with another 5 stars. You know, in case your left side of the screen with the heading text is getting a little bit too busy, you know, you can add some other things into that form instead of it just having to be, you know, a blank box with three inputs that don’t tell people what to do.

Austin Gray: And something that you can also do here is that button that you click to submit—be very intentional with them. It's like "Click this button," or "Submit, and we will be in contact with you within the next 20 minutes" or something like that. Let them know exactly what they're going to expect after they submit that in there, because I think that's an issue that I see a lot with any business.

Andy Walker: It’s they submit—you put in your contact information, you submit it, and then you're like, "Okay! I guess I'm done now!" You know? I don’t think I have anything else to—I’ll just wait and see if somebody calls me. You can even redirect them to another page where it says, "Hey, our expert team is going to be in contact with you in the next 20 minutes. Please keep your phone by your side; you're going to receive a call here very soon." Something of that nature, you know? You’re being intentional with exactly what's going to happen, because if you're not intentional with exactly what's going to happen, you might potentially lose that lead.

So every single touchpoint that we have with the customer is important, and that being a major one because you don’t want to just get their contact information, and then they never answer the phone, you never hear from them, you know? We're trying to pull the most amount of juice out of every single lead that comes to your website.

Austin Gray: Striker Digital specializes in SEO services specifically for local service businesses. Bod and Andy, the two co-founders, have helped me get Bearclaw Land Services to the number one search result on Google inside my state for my specific search term. If you want to learn more, visit stryker-digital.com—that's S-T-R-Y-K-E-R-Digital.com.

Andy Walker: What else do you want to coach us on for structuring your website next?

Austin Gray: Yeah, so we have a very specific structure that we like to follow. So it's going to be the hero section of all those details that we talked about, which it’s good we spent a lot of time on that because it is, again, the most important.

So as you scroll down through the page, then once you break that fold, we have two options: we're either going to highlight the services that you offer directly right there right away, or we can add additional social proof. So in that social proof, it might be videos of work that you've completed and testimonials from customers—if you have that, awesome!

If you do have that, you're probably absolutely crushing it. All of the biggest businesses that I know, they have testimonials from customers; they have videos of their work. If they're a roofer, maybe they have drone footage of the roofs, and they're showing that in an edited video while also overlaying conversation with a testimonial from that customer.

So that's going to be perfect because every additional piece of social proof you have, especially that third-party social proof, makes people more confident when they buy from you.

It's the same concept as when you go to Amazon and if you're going to buy a product and there are two of the same products; they're basically the same—almost the same price—and one has a thousand 5-star reviews and the other has six, you're typically always going to go with the one that has a thousand 5-star reviews because you feel more confident that this product that you're purchasing is going to get you the outcome that you want.

So if you have a lot of social proof, you need to make that loud and clear in front of them. So in that next section, you're going to have your testimonials. If you have them—if you do not, we're going to move right into your services section.

So in web design, we call these “service cards.” You know, they’re like another rectangle, and there will be a button inside the rectangle where you can hit "explore service," and you can go off to that page to learn more about that specific service—whether it's "roof installation," "roof repair," or whatever your service might be.

Insert any service in there, and in there, we're going to include a picture of what that service is and hopefully a real picture from your real work with a one-sentence description about it and then just a call to action to take them to the page to learn more information. You’re going to highlight your services.

And a major thing that I see is a lot of people want to highlight every single service that they possibly offer ever. You can't have 20 services highlighted; it's going to take up a lot of your real estate there. The reality is if most people can assume that if you do roof installation, you probably do roof repair, right? You know, you can provide those services together. You can have enough hope that people can come to a logical conclusion on their end that you're going to provide both of those services.

So in this section, you have to highlight all of them—highlight the prime categories where you get most of your business revenue—what services they are—list them in there.

Austin Gray: Okay, so those are the cards. How many services do you want to limit on the cards?

Andy Walker: Yeah, typically we won’t ever do more than six because you can have a—you can have a grid straight across. So if you're on a desktop and you're looking at the website, you can see three cards, you scroll, see another three, and then boom, you're on to the next section.

On mobile, that's still kind of long, right? You've got to scroll through six of those. So that's a lot of real estate taken up. But that's usually the maximum. If you can narrow it down to three, that's absolutely excellent. That is the most ideal scenario.

But it's hard because you do need to showcase the work that you do. So, you know, all of this is on a case-by-case basis, right? There’s not one solution that fits all for every single business. So like when you’re working with your web designer, your web developer, you know, this is something that you’re going to discuss—you're going to talk about.

As the business owner, you should be relying on their experience from building hundreds of other home service business websites and a lot of people in your industry and knowing what works to recommend to you what to do. But at the same time, you have to strike that same balance again. As a web developer, when we’re building a website for somebody, we have to understand we have to represent their brand the way they want their brand represented.

And we will recommend as much as possible to strike that balance with them. But at the end of the day, you know, as the owner, it is your brand, and that has to be represented how you want it to be.

Austin Gray: Under a basic website, what would those cards be linked to?

Andy Walker: Yeah, so you would have a button like "learn more," "explore this service," and things like that. So that'll link to what we call your primary service pages. So if you’re clicking on a "roof installation" page, it’s on the "learn more" under the "roof installation" service card. It's going to take you to a page specifically with that service.

You’re going to show more evidence of your work. You’re going to highlight more social proof. You’re going to tell them about how the process works. You know, step one: you contact us; we send somebody to your house to give you a free estimate. Step two, you know, we go through whatever step two is. Step three, you have the finished job—it's excellent, you're happy. You don't pay until you're satisfied type of deal, you know? Because that's something we're also going to get to in the next section of the homepage, which if you want me to, I’ll just dive into it right now?

Austin Gray: Please do!

Andy Walker: Yeah, so we always want to make it, you know, I've been hitting on this quite a few times. We always want to make it as frictionless as possible. So you want to make it look as frictionless as possible to work with you as well.

So below that services section, we're going to typically have a "how it works" section. And it's going to be three items wide. So it might just be a circle with a number one in it, and below that, it’s going to be the first step in the process, which is typically getting contact; we’ll come give you the estimate, yada yada, something of that nature.

And then maybe a pointing arrow to number two, which is step number two in your process, which will be independent of your business. But maybe at that point, it's—you know, you're already starting the work. We'll send our team on within two days to begin inspection and start your service. Step three: after two weeks, the service will be completed, and we will not leave until you’re a super satisfied happy customer ready to leave a 5-star review.

You know, I’m just spitballing like text that you can use here, but you can get an understanding because we’re just communicating to them like, "Oh, this isn’t going to—this isn’t going to take too much of my time to do. You know, all I have to do is call them, and they’ll send somebody out, they’ll get it all set up, and then they’ll take care of the rest.”

That's really what you're trying to communicate to them in this section.

And then once you work through that section, the next one below is going to be more of an "about us." You know, what makes you different? What makes you stand out? Are you veteran-owned? Are you a local family business? If yes, you know, you're going to have a picture of you and your team on there.

Maybe some community events that you've participated in before. If you donate to a charity, highlight things like that in an "about us" section, which I think is very, very important because we talked about this the first time I was on the podcast. But you know, if you're a home service business owner, you are coming to people's homes where their children are or where their valuables are. You know, it’s not an easy task to just let somebody come into your home, right?

So this just enters back into the trust component. So when you can see a smiling face of the team and the people who are actually going to be showing up or the person that you’re going to call on the phone and talk to—believe it or not, you can build trust over the internet. I mean, you’re listening to this podcast right now; you probably have never met us in person.

You might have listened to Austin's last 20 episodes, and you already trust him a lot just because you feel like you know him. You know, you saw a friendly smiling face, and it’s warm; it’s welcoming. You know, and that's something that you should definitely highlight on your website.

Austin Gray: Yeah, definitely! I've seen a couple of companies doing this, like putting professional photos of their team. It’s G&M Outdoor Services—Garrett and Marina—a brother and sister. I've had them both on the podcast. They have one of their sales reps, Michael, I think is his name, front and center on their website. Exactly what you're talking about—like a professional photo. He's smiling; I think he may even have like a thumbs up or something like that. But it's just like this is part of the "how it works" process, and here's the person who is going to be giving you a call when you fill out the form.

I’m sure you can validate this, Andy, but when a customer takes the next step and fills out that form and Michael calls them—or in our case, like Josiah calls them—they're like, "Oh my gosh, this is actually real!" Like they're doing exactly what they said they were going to do, and then it builds even more trust.

Andy Walker: 100% agree! You basically set an expectation and then you meet that expectation, and therefore that is already communicating to them that you are trustworthy. You’re going to show up on time, you’re responsible, you’re going to provide great quality work for whatever they’re purchasing.

Austin Gray: What about the next section? Is there anything else after about us?

Andy Walker: Yeah, so again, we’re going to highlight more reviews in this section. So depending upon tools at your disposal, you can pull in live Google reviews onto your website—Google verified reviews. If not, you know, your web developer can just design the reviews for you there and take real ones off of your Google business profile and paste that in there with the people's names and put a big Google logo on it.

Right? Because again, the more social proof we have from big trusted brands like that, the better. So we're going to highlight reviews again, and then, you know, that's a pretty relatively simple section. And then below that, we're going to have a frequently asked questions section.

So this is for user experience for them. Because you as the owner, you can dictate this, you know what questions you get asked the most. So let's just handle the objections before they can even happen, you know, before we even have to get our salesperson on the team. Let’s just already have those questions answered there for them already done.

You know, because then we can just like bypass all objection handling and just get right into the meat of it and close the deal. So probably like three to six frequently asked questions, you know, you don’t need a big 20-question list. Nobody's going to read all of that text.

And that's just another thing to note is that most people aren't going to come on your website and read 3,000 words. You need to keep it very short and concise. And then below that section, another big contact form at the bottom, and then your footer section, and your homepage is done. You're set; you're good to go at that point.

So that's everything in the homepage. Do you want to do a quick recap of everything?

Andy Walker: Back to that hero section, which is above the fold before you scroll on the website. There are going to be two segments to it. On your left side, you're going to have that heading one tag where you're going to include your SEO keywords. There’s going to be a little bit of text below that where you're going to have your value proposition—"50 years in business, licensed and insured," you know, something of that nature—along with your call-to-action button that highlights your phone number and allows them to actually click and make a call if they're on mobile.

And then, additional social proof—highlight, you know, "150+ 5-star Google reviews" on that right side of the screen. You're going to have your form where you're going to tell them exactly what they're going to get. You're going to get a free estimate; you're going to get a free consultation; we're going to come to your house! Enter your information, expect to hear from us in 20 minutes! And you're going to keep it very, very simple and concise: name, email, phone number—that’s it! Move on.

Below that section, if you have video testimonials of your work or video testimonials from customers, you're going to highlight those right away. If you don't, you're going to move right onto your services section, where you're really going to try and narrow it down between three and six primary services that you offer.

Have what we call a card there with an image of that service, the headline of, you know, what that service is called, and a button for them to go to the page to learn more about that service. Below that section, "About Us": highlight really what you do. You're family-owned, you're veteran-owned, you've lived in this community for 20 years. You have a picture of you and your team.

You know, if you're a solo owner operator—which maybe a lot of people are listening to this podcast—a picture of you and your family will do excellent! That would be fantastic to have one there. People love to see that kind of thing, and they love to support those kinds of people as well.

And then below that section, we’re going to have our frequently asked questions, the contact form, and your footer. Just, you know, that’s pretty standard across all websites there. So nothing super special to highlight there!

Austin Gray: Awesome! That was a great recap. That was literally like—I think you did that in like 90 seconds or less on the recap there! So we're going to take a snippet of that, and we’re going to put that at the beginning of the interview for like an introduction because that right there was the quick 90-second master class on what you need for your basic website.

Is there anything else outside of that basic homepage that you would recommend for somebody who's just getting started or has already put a deposit down on paying another designer to design their website?

Andy Walker: Yeah, I think we covered it, but just highlighting it one more time is making sure you have your keywords that you want to rank for included throughout there. So the big one being your heading one tag.

And then something we didn't talk about is heading two tags. So those sections below there you’re going to have more bold text that highlights what that section is about. So as soon as people see it, they know what information they’re going to receive.

In those heading two texts, you can also include different variations of keywords that you want. So if you’re targeting roof installation or roof repair—I keep using roofing as an example—but you would plug those keywords throughout there naturally because Google’s going to look at all of those heading tags.

The heading one tag is going to be the biggest one, the most important, but you’re also going to do everything right. You’re not going to leave a single stone unturned, so you’re going to include those keywords throughout there as well.

Austin Gray: If your H1 was "Denver's most trusted roofing company," what would you use in like two, three, and four?

Andy Walker: Good question. Let's say we wanted to really highlight like our main focus that we want to win is on roof installations, right? So if you have that testimonial section, your heading two tag might be, "Hear from our customers about recent roof installations completed in Denver, Colorado." That would be a perfect one!

You know, so anything along those lines. It just has to pair with what the material in the section is going to be. But just finding a natural way to put that in there is, I think, the perfect example for a heading two.

Austin Gray: Awesome! So if going back to like drone footage—if you had a sweet edited video of your crew doing roofs and there was drone footage, and then you had like a cut of a clip where it’s like, you know, your sales rep shaking a customer’s hand, like all that good stuff showcasing quality, what are you using for the copy in that H2 for that video section?

Andy Walker: Yeah, similarly to with the testimonial, it’s like, “See examples of a recent roof installation in West Palm Beach, Florida.” Something of that nature, you know, including your primary keyword. So it's probably going to be a secondary keyword.

So we have "roofing company." If we go back to that hero section, we're using like "Denver's best roofing company." So then in that heading two for the next section, you're saying, "View a recent roof repair that we completed in Denver, Colorado." You know, you can make it sound a little bit better. I'm spitballing off the top of my head, but you can get a little fancier with it there.

So ultimately what I’m trying to extract out of you is just some examples like that, and that's a perfect one, Andy! So basically, like for any listeners, just coming back to reiterate this point: use your service as a keyword, and then use your location, and then talk about the section and make it relevant.

Andy Walker: Absolutely correct!

We have our homepage done, and we have those service cards, right? Each of those are going to be clickable and allow you to go to a page all about that service.

It's just going to be the same thing replicated but it's going to be different because if the page you're clicking through is about roof repair, you're obviously going to make sure that your heading one tag on that page in that hero section again is going to be top-rated roof repair services in Denver, Colorado.

And that's the same thing across all the primary service pages, and the content is going to be, it's the same structure as the homepage.

It's just regurgitated a little bit—you know, it's not the same content—but you're following the same setup and same structure across all of these additional pages as well. So it's not overly complex, I don't think.

A topic that we need to dive into like too deep on is just going to make sure in that heading one tag, you're using that keyword, and your heading two tag—the keyword and the location—and then, you know, content about the service throughout the page.

Content that actually answers questions about the service you provide, how you provide it, what it looks like, what the customer experience is going to look like for them when they're doing it.

If you want to be a person that reveals your prices prior—if you have a certain service that allows you to do that—you know, you can hint towards prices starting at $400. But when we’re talking about high ticket services for roofing, obviously like, you know, that’s going to be independent of that specific case of what you’re doing.

So it’s going to be tough to show prices, but you could do that as well. I used to be very against showing prices on the website; I’m more neutral about it now because there are two buckets of thought for this.

Austin Gray: The price people will see it and it'll scare them away and they'll go get on the phone with someone else and be in their sales process.

Andy Walker: Exactly. But a lot of people are busy, and they just want to know the price up front. Those are typically going to be—if they then call you and they already know the price, they’re already really highly qualified leads.

So you can view it from that aspect. Like the price is there—you know exactly what you’re going to get, what you can expect to pay if you call. I know you already did this, and we can just, you know, cut through all the BS and get going.

But, you know, the other bucket is if you don’t show your prices on your website, you have the opportunity to put your sales process into play. They have to call and give you their contact information to get the pricing.

Austin Gray: If you had to choose one, which route would you go?

Andy Walker: I would go with no pricing still; I’m still biased towards that.

Austin Gray: Do you guys share your pricing on your agency?

Andy Walker: We do not! I was actually—we’re in conversation to do that probably because it’ll be the same thing for us. You know, we have plenty of case studies; we have plenty of testimonials. People know the quality of work that we provide. Here’s the price! You know, if you can’t afford the price right now, then you know, save both parties’ time in that essence, right?

But you guys are making a strategic decision based on where you’re at in business, right? Like you probably don’t want to be filling Bod's pipeline with people who are like just starting out and don’t have the budget to pay for this.

Andy Walker: It all depends on, you know, this goes for any business. It really depends on the amount of lead flow that you have and where you want to invest your resources. Because say you're spending—like say your home service business—you’re spending $50,000 a month on ads. You have tons of leads coming through, and you’re doing in-person estimates, and 50% of them are unqualified leads.

Austin Gray: You’re wasting a lot of time and resources.

Andy Walker: Exactly! It’s a waste of your guys’ time; you’re wasting your company’s resources to get them to do that. So when the price is just there, you know, the quantity of leads that come through will naturally go down, but the close rate technically should rise because the more leads—those leads will be more qualified.

So it’s kind of a pick-your-poison. If you’re a brand new business and you’re small, I would, you know, just optimize to get as many leads as possible, no matter what. Because maybe you’re just willing to work for a cheaper price just to get the review—just to get the testimonial and things like that.

But if you’re a bigger business with a lot of lead flow, it probably makes more sense in that aspect to, you know, show a price and qualify people better.

Austin Gray: I agree with you 100%. And then there will be certain scenarios where like with my business or with a roofing business—like high ticket services—you can’t put your price because every project is different. You may have a $220,000 project on one and a $200,000 project on the next one.

And the reason being is because you've got different pieces of equipment showing up and different amounts of people, and you may be doing a septic dig on one and a land clearing job on the other. So, you know, I think the answer to the question is answered for a lot of people who are actually listening to this podcast who have the higher ticket services.

I have a topic a little bit higher level if you want to dive into something higher level that, you know, as internet marketing businesses we do, but home services haven’t adopted and they don't quite do this yet, but I think the ones that do will do really, really well.

Austin Gray: Interesting! You’ve caught my attention, and so let’s dive into it!

Andy Walker: So if you guys have followed me on Twitter or you followed Bod, something that we will do to generate leads is we’ll put together a document. Basically, I’ve done this a couple of times; I’ve put literally everything I know about SEO into one document and I give it away absolutely for free.

So you’re willing to—you want that value; you want what I created, and you’re willing to give me your contact information to receive it. You know, it’s no price—you just have to give me your name and your email, and now I have your contact information. Now I can nurture you for a really, really long time. You’re going to be on my email list, and I have a valuable newsletter where I'm not selling you, I'm not pitching you; I'm just providing you free value over and over and over again until the point where you're like, "Wow, you know, these guys definitely know what they’re doing here.

It would just save me a lot of time and money if I just did it with them now!" That's really the angle. Then when you look at it from a home service business perspective, your lead magnet could simply be, you know, this is a spitball a little bit, “Upcoming holiday discounts—be the first to know!” You know? Name, email, phone number, something of that nature, right?

Or, you know, "Be the first to know about flash sales" or "20% off your first house wash, limit to the first five people." You’re going to contact information; you’ll leave that up past five people so you can get that contact information, right?

But the entire point of getting the contact information is one—we talked about putting your sales process into play—but when you have this information, you can then retarget forever and ever and ever afterwards until somebody potentially opts out of your funnel.

So you can nurture them for a long time because sometimes the case will be that people are interested in—you offer a luxury service like the artificial turf installation, right? People are interested, and they're learning about it now, but like right now, it just might not be the time for them to do it.

You know, their kid's starting school, they're a little bit busy, or they just had a different bill; they just finished paying off their car; they just bought a new car. They just don't have the money to do it right now, but they're interested!

And you have an interested prospect, so you can just nurture them over time with emails and SMS offers. And when you know it's a super cheap form of marketing to send an email, you know, you can go get like a ConvertKit or a Beehive subscription for like, I don't know, $50 a month, and that's literally your maximum price.

And then it’s just your time to send them emails. As a home service business, I don’t think you have to send that frequently, you know? Once a month, stay top of mind!

Andy Walker: Because I was a very good example of this is working with a painting company and he retargets people like this, and his logic as to why he does this is one time a very long time ago, he had someone paint his house, and he’s like, "A year later, I could have never even told you who that company was that painted my house. I have no idea!"

And therefore, you know, they’re going to need that service or additional services that you offer again in the future, so you just need to stay top of mind. It’s the same thing for pressure washing because pressure washing is a semi-recurring business. A lot of people will pay to get their gutters cleaned, and their house washed by you.

Maybe they’ll be expecting you to reach out to them next year to do it again, but if not, you know, you can just be in front of their eyes for super cheap on the lock screen of their phone with a text message and an email offering your services with a special offer.

So having some sort of lead magnet like that to just capture people's information and get them into a nurturing funnel, I think is going to go a really, really long way because even if you don't win that customer in the moment, you don't win that customer—you could potentially make money from them 12, 18 months, or 24 months down the road.

And you know, I think this is just what really high-level operators do is that they squeeze every single possible dollar that they can out of anywhere, all the time, always—because that's how you get the best margins.

Austin Gray: If you paid $80 for that lead on Google ads, you know, you make your money back maybe 18 months later.

Andy Walker: Yeah, it's hard to attribute it that way. But this is what the really top guys do. Like you had Sam on here, and he’s someone who doesn't know how much like I learned from him just secondary reading his tweets and things like that.

He’s a guy who really, really knows his numbers well, and nothing slips through the cracks with him. Every single lead is definitely documented and definitely followed up, and then followed up with a year later, two years later, and so on. And you know, that's really how you're going to get the most bang for your buck on any marketing efforts that you do.

You know, you can’t just talk to a lead one time and then just, "Oh, I didn’t get the job, move on. Hope for the next one!" You know, you have to be on the ball. You have to be on people! Sometimes they also just need a nudge to buy from you! Like for right now, like I need snow tires on my vehicle. I know I need to go buy snow tires, but like I have a million other things I need to do business-wise!

But if somebody was calling me right now like, "Hey! We've got a special, you know, 10% off, come in today on snow tires!” It’s like I'm probably dropping everything else and going, taking my truck down because this is a service I absolutely need. Same thing with the roof—it's like people know they need to repair their roof.

Same thing with like the fire mitigation stuff we do—it's like a lot of people know they need to do it. But like if you're just sitting back letting them come to you, that's a hard thing for a lot of people to do. But if you get back in front of them, if you keep it top of mind—one, it reminds them that they need to do it because some people have likely forgotten that they need to replace their roof because they have 102 tasks that they need to do for work that day.

Andy Walker: Yeah, I agree with you on that with Sam. Like incredible operator! And in that interview, I did take that away as well. Like when he gets a lead, it’s like that's in his pipeline, and he is following up with them until they absolutely tell him not to.

Austin Gray: Yep, yeah! As you should, and you just also gave the perfect example of somebody that just needs a nudge! You know, you need the snow tires and it’s like it’s on your list. Every day you wake up, and you’re like “Ah! I need to do this thing. I need to do this thing!”

But it’s one of those things that’s just kind of a big thing to do. It takes your time, you know? It takes your effort, it takes your money! Right? And you just need somebody to push you over that edge a little bit to make you take action. And that's exactly what your goal is—to get people to take action.

Austin Gray: Yeah! I mean think about it—most of these service businesses, mine included, like we show up and we meet with the client on-site. As much as we like to think that we're doing a great job of delivering great service, like sometimes it’s just annoying to meet with a contractor.

Like you've got a million things to do as a consumer! It's like, "Okay, I know I need to do this. I booked the meeting with the contractor, and then the day the contractor's shown up, it's like, 'Crap! I’ve got a million other things I need to do.'"

Andy Walker: So it's like it's not always the most joyful thing to do—to take time out of their day to meet with you either. But if they know they need the service and you're doubling up and you're following back up with texts and an email campaign—which I do have an interesting tool to share!

I just had a call with Brian Shankman. Have you met Brian yet from ToolDesk?

Austin Gray: Yes! Yep, I did Brian's podcast.

Andy Walker: Oh, you did? Yep! I’m familiar with the tool that he built! So go check out ToolDesk. I literally came back across it last night because I'm using Jobber, and I think I told you right now we’re on snowplow accounts.

So I have all these customers that we’ve marketed to already who live in our geographic region that we’ve marketed on the, you know, either tree services, land clearing, dirt work, any of the excavation stuff. And we have this database of customers. I need to be in front of those people!

Like why would I not be offering snowplowing services to all those people? I am running ads right now to get snowplow leads, but we need a quick way to market to those. And so what Brian has built is a tool called ToolDesk.

It integrates with Jobber; it's a one-click add-on. And then you can send texts and/or emails to your customers and segment them by list. So you can say like, "Hey! All the customers from 2024, send them an email!"

Like, "Hey, all the jobs completed or all the invoices paid by customers in 2024 so that you could follow up back up." Check in with them on, “Hey, it’s Bearclaw Land Services! Just wanted to let you know that we are offering snowplow services this year for anyone who needs. Sign up now! Get 10% off, you refer somebody; I’ll give you—I don’t know—some sort of Starbucks gift card or whatever! I'm just spitballing right now.

But my point being is having that ability to remarket quickly out of Jobber is a pretty cool tool. So I just signed up for it; it’s like $99 a month, but I'll pay $99 right now to get marketing material out to a customer quick.

Andy Walker: Another thing about that is that people that have already purchased from you in the past are much more probable to purchase from you again is a big component of that. And if you guys go to ToolDesk.co, Brian's website is a perfect example of everything we were talking about.

His big heading one tag, his value proposition, his call to action, his social proof, what problems the tool solves—aka your services if you’re a home service business—it's the perfect example of a website!

Austin Gray: Dude, I was going to bring that up earlier too because I went through it last night, and I was like, "Man, he has!" And even on his onboarding process and in his signup flow, he's like strategically placed reviews at every friction point, and he’s got like review sliders.

You can definitely tell he comes from the tech world and has been involved in some sort of marketing function before, because it’s very well-designed for as early stage of a startup as they are.

Andy Walker: I have one question for you about doing in-person estimates, which I think will also give value to all the listeners. So when somebody, you know, comes into your funnel—they're a lead—the salesperson contacts them about showing up for an in-person estimate and giving the time—is there a point of friction where you're like, "Hey, just tell me what time," and they tell you a time, and you're like, "Oh, I’m already booked out at that time"?

Or do you just send them like a Calendly type of deal where it’s like, "Hey, these are all the available times we have"? This is how long it’ll take at whatever your convenience is; schedule a time in. Do you do anything of that nature?

Austin Gray: What I like to do, like when I was in the sales role, my whole deal is to call your leads as fast as possible! If you're not getting the response of "Oh my gosh! That was fast!"—like you're too slow on the call, and you should be getting that response!

Like if you call them immediately and if you have the proper automation set up, where your leads are texted straight to your phone, you can click the number, you can call. "Hey, it's Austin from Bearclaw Land Services! I saw that you filled out the form on the website! How are you today?" Holy crap! That was fast!

If you’re not getting that, you're too slow!

My whole goal is like to get the customer on the phone! The reason being is because we deal with a lot of second homeowners who are traditionally more like Baby Boomers, who are paying customers. So if I send them a Calendly link, like most of the people just aren’t going to know what it is or how it works if they’re 60 or 70 years old.

And so what I prefer to do is just get on the phone! On that phone call, I’m asking them about their project first, just clarifying questions. "Please tell me about your project!" I just get them to talk. And then after they tell me about that, I would just say, "Hey, so my process is, before I give you an estimate, I just want to see the project in-person. What time works better for you, morning or afternoon?"

And then if they're like, "Well, I usually go to yoga class in the morning at 9 AM," whatever, then I just go in the afternoon! And I just have my schedule up, and I book a time.

It seems to go way quicker if you can just kind of control the conversation based off of your availability with the calendar.

Andy Walker: Right? That's what I found! Now, if you can’t get that, then things obviously change as well. In my opinion, it's like don’t over-complicate it! Get the people on the phone; ask them what time works, and then show up.

When people say like, "Oh, how soon could you get here?" it's like "What about right now?" Like, if you don’t have stuff right now, go! Because that’s the most important thing in business is like go get new customers, right?

Austin Gray: People appreciate it if you're fast.

Andy Walker: Yes, I totally agree!

I like how you’re very intentional about everything. For example, like you're like morning or afternoon. So you already just segment it into two possible options, then you already exclude a full segment, and it's like, okay, well, "2 PM to 7 PM. What time in there works for you?" And it’s simple that way because I think a fear that I would have if I was doing an online booking—like a Calendly or something—is you just really hit the nail on the head up with the speed.

Like we call them as fast as possible, and I want to get to their house as fast as possible because they're most likely to buy in that time right there. Instead of, if you give them one week until you’re at their house, you know, a lot’s going to change!

They’re not going to be as excited as they were in the moment when they saw your ad or they were on your website and they opted in. So I think it’s just an overall business principle, right? It’s just speed wins! Speed wins! It’s just like—it’s no different than sports, right? Speed definitely wins!

Austin Gray: All right, man, we’ve covered a lot. If you haven’t signed up for the Weekly Newsletter yet, go to ownrops.com/newsletter. That's ownrops.com/newsletter. We summarize all the learning lessons from the interviews with the guests on the podcast, and we distill those into short actionable tips, tricks, tactics, and strategies that you can use to grow your own local service business.

Andy Walker: Absolutely!

Austin Gray: Don't forget—work hard, do your best, never settle for less. We'll see you guys in the next episode!