To listen to this podcast episode, visit Ep 58: Back to Basics with Local SEO.

Kevin Oakley 0:12
Welcome to Market Proof Marketing, the weekly podcast from the marketing minds at DoYouConvert.com, where we talk about the current state of all things digital and how they impact Home Builders and developers around the globe. We’re not here to sell you. We’re here to help you and to try and elevate the conversation. I’m Kevin Oakley and with me today is Becca, because the Ad Doctor is moving into his brand new home. Right now. It is Friday at 3:15pm. On July the 12th. And the moving trucks are probably about half empty. At this point. I would

Becca Thomas 0:46
Oh, oh, yeah. Well, hi.

Kevin Oakley 0:49
Yeah. Hi, Andrew. It’s always fun to listen to an episode that you’re not on. Right. When you’re usually the one behind the microphone. Especially, but I know they are. They are relieved. Just be in and moving on. It’ll be interesting. The story time updates about the house are not over. I’m sure. You’ve had a pretty smooth sailing since you moved in. Yes. All things considered. Yes.

Becca Thomas 1:17
Five Star builder experiences. And I hope that from now on, Andrew ends up with a five star.

Kevin Oakley 1:26
Why we should update people to I don’t have this in the show notes for Rebecca. But Mike Lyon also moved into his new house. Oh, yeah. Which was a new construction home. It was almost finished. Not quite. But you know, now kind of one of the internal jokes we tease each other about is, you know, Mike started on his new home search, like four and a half months after Andrew signed the contract on his own. And he moved in, you know, a week and a half, two weeks before him. And he also has had a five star experience. So

Becca Thomas 1:59
remember, hey,

Kevin Oakley 2:00
okay, I can’t stop. I can’t I also had breakfast this morning with Will Duderstadt and Sean Carpenter, who has been on the program before. And Sean, he was telling me like, you know, it’s just so fun to listen to Andrew’s updates, because I’ll have to try to do this, maybe too. He goes, if you think back to when this started. Andrew is like, We’re good. We’re on schedule. We’re gonna hit closing day. He’s like, and he were trying to tell him back then Kevin, like, Don’t get too excited about that. He’s like, Oh, no, we’re gonna be we’re gonna be on time. We’re gonna be on time. We’re good. All good. And I don’t even remember doing that. But it was kind of cool to hear his perspective of how it’s gone, unfortunately for the Peek household, but they’re there. They’re there now. So yeah,

Becca Thomas 2:40
yeah.

Kevin Oakley 2:41
Andrew will be joining the ranks of Mr. Lyon, Mr. Oakley, and, and Becca, in terms of working out of his own home, which can be great. It can be awful, right? You like it. Do you like it?

Becca Thomas 2:55
Yeah. I do. A little bit of getting used to discuss, you know, you get to talk to your animals more than people. Sometimes. Yeah,

Kevin Oakley 3:05
sometimes. Yeah. And some people I’m pointing at myself, kind of like that theory of not having to talk to as many people I digress. Okay, so, Andrew is not able to join us on this episode, Thais Cuffy, I was going to have her join, and kind of let you hear her voice and her some of her perspective. She is riding out the hurricane in New Orleans. She actually lives in New Orleans proper. And they’re getting hit with some close to hurricane force winds. I haven’t checked the latest update. But don’t be surprised if you see her standing next to the weatherman in the middle of a. I’m just kidding. Hopefully.

Becca Thomas 3:45
With her DYC shirt on.

Kevin Oakley 3:48
Right? That’s hilarious. Yeah. So I don’t know what “riding out” the hurricane really even means it seems like a strange phrase to use, but she is riding out the hurricane. So it’s just Becca and I, which is gonna be fun. So this going to be a shorter episode. We wanted to make sure we gave you something here. But we also know we’ve given you a couple hour and a half long episodes in recent weeks. So we’ll give your ears a rest. But let’s, let’s start out with storytime. Becca I’ll let you kick us off.

Becca Thomas 4:18
Well, this week on Ads Review. I’m laughing because I like to review our ads. Every week I review a section of them. And recently, I’ve been seeing more and more ads with most relevant comments written at the bottom. I’ve been seeing those in our partner ads, as well as in my own feed. So what does that mean? Just kidding. So what it really means is, it’s a personalized order of comments. So what you see it’s going to be a little bit different than when I see. So it’s comments or reaction from your friends, comments from verified profiles and pages, and then comments with the most likes and replies. So it’s important to make sure that if you’ve got a troll on the loose, that you curtail them quickly, because all the trolls friends are going to see the trolls comments. Whereas, good point, if they are not relevant to that person looking, they will see. Okay, so

Kevin Oakley 5:33
that that brings more credence to the idea of making sure you’re curating comments, and potentially not being afraid to hide or delete if they are, again, this. If people listen to this episode, I’m going to waste a couple seconds here and provide full context again, I’m not talking about deleting all of your haters. out I’m talking about is a legit troll, someone who just you know is screaming and all caps. This homebuilders sucks, you should never trust them, that kind of thing. You do need to engage with people, you need to take all forms of feedback into account and ideally have an offline dialogue. And and we’ve talked a lot, many different news articles and story times about the need to engage with your consumer and not ignore them. Not just throw stuff under the rug. That’s not what you’re talking about. You’re you’re talking about. curate those comments, specifically so that the right people continue to see the right type of ads and comments.

Becca Thomas 6:30
Yeah, related to us. It’s not showing how it used to show which was all the comments no matter what they were, it’s really showing the most relevant for section that you scroll.

Kevin Oakley 6:41
Yeah. And I find that when most pages and people that I follow that actually really annoys me, I didn’t understand the concept of why Facebook would want to do that. But the first thing I must always do is undo that selection and save you all because I want to see the whole com text of the conversation, not just the most relevant, right? But

Becca Thomas 7:02
yes, yeah. And you can change it for you. So you always see all the comments. Oh, really?

Kevin Oakley 7:09
I love it. Yeah, cool. I will do.

Becca Thomas 7:14
But it doesn’t affect how everybody sees your page. And you can’t go in there and change the order. Right? Right.

Kevin Oakley 7:25
Awesome. Awesome. My, my story time is all about the value of organic social media. And just another spin again, this is something that easily is taken out of context. People say Kevin, thanks social media stupid, just like I know, you know, I say billboards suck. Everything has a rule as to why it would work, right? If you get a fantastic price on a billboard that the amount of attention you feel you’re getting way outpaces the price, you pay, you should do a billboard, even though I still will say because I want more people to stop and consider how they’re doing billboards, I will continue to say that billboards suck so bad about away. I was on a coaching call with someone and I had been talking to their boss, or their boss’s boss on a coaching call that we had that. And we were talking about where to spend time and two younger marketers were added to the team about six months or so ago. And one of the sales leaders has been really big on making sure that they have a better presence on social media more consistent. And I said, You know, I don’t know, you got to be careful that you make sure your time and investment is, is being done the right way. And so that had been passed along to this person. And so I’m on a call with them. And I said, Hey, before we get going, any specific questions, things you want to talk through, and she was like, yeah, you know, I this person gave me the feedback that you said that are organic, social versus the paid social ads. You know, we need to be careful about how we approach this because I just don’t really know what you mean by that. I said, I would love to show you some of my perspective. So what I did first is I said, Okay, how often right now, are you posting on? Let’s just use Facebook only right now. Facebook. Now lets us do Facebook and Instagram. How much are you posting on Facebook and Instagram? Well, I’ve been tasked with basically doing one post a day. Got it? How do you how you do that. Now, for people who are listening that don’t do marketing for home builders. You might think Gosh, posting something is so quick and painless, right? I just something happens in my life. I hop on there. I say this was great oatmeal. I take a picture I posted that took me 45 seconds. Yeah. But when you’re marketing a homebuilder, you got a lot of other considerations take into account, you got to spread the love around all the communities, all the different floor plans, the different sales people, you know, you have to play fair to your internal customers, or you’re going to hear about it, you got to make sure that they come the the content is interesting and relevant to your external audience. You got to probably touch up some of the photos here in there just contrast brightness, etc. You got to actually think about the text you’re going to use you got to proofread it, you should proofread it twice. So you don’t do something silly like I did one time, which was to advertise, you know, double panties instead of double pantries. That was that was an awkward one. So I said, Okay, once a day, how often? or How long does it take you to do that? Each one of those posts? And do you batch this? Do you set it up in a using a buffer? Or their names are escaping me at the moment. But lots of those different services lets you schedule? Or are you scheduling within Facebook and Instagram itself. So she was awesome. And that her honesty really impressed me. She said it takes about 20 to 30 minutes per post to kind of from beginning to end, I was like that, I think you’re being very honest, let’s just use maybe the lower range. But still, once you do the math, anywhere from 12 to 14 hours a month of this person’s time is dedicated to creating these organic posts instead of doing something else. And that’s the big law of management is making sure you’re always aware that everything has a trade off. If you spend those 12 hours doing this you do you have 12 hours less to help some other party organization. So we had all this fundamental conversation. And then I showed her the analytics for the month of June. And I said, Okay, so this is a two market builder. So this person is only responsible for one of those two markets. But both markets and total, their total organic traffic from posting every day was 811 unique users. Wow. Versus the 15,000 plus users who had come from paid ads, of which,

for full context, probably only five or six different campaigns running. Probably around $3,000, $2000 to $3,000. I don’t know, I don’t have the number right in front of me for that. And I said, How do you feel about the number 811? For all that work and effort you put into it? And she goes, Yeah, I kind of see your point. And, and, and then she said, but we do this, you know, featured home post once a week, and two of the homes that I’ve done recently have sold. And I said fantastic. Let’s take a look at the data. Do you remember those homes. So we look up, we look up the home on on the site, go to analytics, do site content, you know all content and filter out just the page of that home in the month of June, there were two organic social media visits, and over 500 and some from paid social. And then like three organic and to direct or something crazy. So I said hey, I’m not telling you that that your organic posting, didn’t sell the homes. I’m just saying statistically, it’s not looking great so far. So now last step. I know this is a long story time, but we don’t have much else to cover. So I said the last step is let’s go and look at the actual post. And the actual post itself, because, and I saw surprising or uncommon, so I’m not faulting this person. But the post itself for this feature at home did not include a link to the actual direct listing of that house, on the site. So you combine that meaning that the customer would have to Google the builders name or click on a general length and sort filter, find the exact house again, that was featured all those things. That plus the fact that only two came from organic. To view that specific home leads me to believe that it probably didn’t. So I wasn’t trying to completely depress her. But she did understand them what I meant by it’s not that organic, social does not have value, it absolutely has value. It has value for the people who are already paying attention. Especially. Okay, I’m exposed to this brand, this company, I want to go see what are they doing and talking about on social? Are they relevant? Are they consistent? Are they present? But that that to me, and everyone’s gonna have a different number on this. But if I saw that someone generally has been posting once a week or so yeah, I personally am okay with that, as a consumer, I wouldn’t think oh, my gosh, this company has fallen asleep at the wheel of their social media account. I’d be more interested in as I go back through the stack, the quality of each and every one of those posts, right. And you’ll hear me talk more about this at the online summit and other places, or the next year because I become obsessed with this idea of bingeing content and that once the consumer decides they want to go back and look at your stack of social posts, are they going to be impressed and wants to continue benching? Are they going to be like, yeah, don’t need to know how to make soup. Got care about where I’m buying flowers from? I don’t care about that holiday with the cute, you know, custom version of your logo. Hmm, there’s not enough. Like, there’s no meat here. The Big Mac is missing from the from the value meal. I just have a coke. Give me more of the thing that I’m actually going to be spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on

Becca Thomas 15:29
More homes, more kitchens, more master bathrooms, all that good. Yeah. Yep. Yep. So I have a question. This was this. Are these two houses also included in ads?

Kevin Oakley 15:45
Yes. And even in the ads and the inventory ads that you made for them? Yes, it was okay. And that that’s where those other 500 people came from. So that’s the other thing and why it’s important to track stuff, right is because this company right now is trying to figure out they’ve they’ve staffed up, which is awesome. Yay. But they have to clearly define and train and and get everyone in the right position because everyone’s tripping over themselves. But there’s opportunity for people to be paying a little closer attention, and they’ll get there. I don’t have any concerns about a company or how they’re doing it. It’s just it was an interesting story. For me, that I think is tangible, hopefully for a lot of you in that when you’re trying to figure out is something working or not. You can’t necessarily trust your gut. Most of the time, you can’t trust your gut, you got to look at some numbers. And you have to think holistically and track holistically. She didn’t spend as much time of her own on the ad, right? She said, Hey, do you convert? Awesome People? Here’s what I need, please help me. Yes, we built it for them. And so it also is just interesting to see how I forget the exact name for the psychological effect. But whatever you put your time and energy into you value more. Yeah, some people call it the IKEA effect, right? You’re like, look at this great piece of furniture I put together I built this. You know, it’s so much better than that other crap you buy from Target or whatever else that comes pre assembled? Yes. Alright, that ends storytime. As a reminder, we do have a brand new call in number. The last episode just went live as we’re recording this one. So I don’t believe we have any voicemails yet. But that number is 404-369-2595, 404-369-2595. leave a voicemail with questions, comments on this week’s episode, last week episode, or just anything that you would generally like to comment on or have a question about. And we will play that recording. You don’t have to identify who you are, who you work for. You can even at the end, say make me sound like Darth Vader, we can make that happen if you want to protect your identity, but that’ll just give another way for you guys to get interactive with us. All right, onto the news. We got three quick ones here for you. The first one is from Search Engine Land. And the article is titled The state of local SEO, what two big studies tell us about the state of local marketing. And so what we’re talking about here is how is your company and communities positioned using Google My Business or other local focused solutions? like Facebook, Yelp, etc. and kind of surprising, not surprising. What What was your main takeaway before we kind of cover the basics here?

Becca Thomas 18:38
My main takeaway was that it wasn’t surprising that most businesses aren’t doing their best at SEO. But what was surprising is that was for those that do it correctly. Three times more effective.

Kevin Oakley 18:57
Yeah. Right. And so it is a lot about the basics. And so to break the article down a little bit more for you guys, fresh choc, did analysis of 150,000 local business websites, and a company called SOCi SOCi, lowercase I conducted research into 163, franchise brands and 10 different verticals. And so just some interesting stats that that jumped out at you. You know, review responses were somewhat better than QA. So only 2.3% of locations were responding to questions made of their business, on their business listing on their Yelp page, right, there was no interaction of the consumers who were going there. Review responses were better than question responses, which kind of goes back to you know, you focus on the pain. Sometimes, when people are giving you a bad or mediocre review you feel compelled to answer. But when they’re asking you a question, you’re kind of like, well, they’re not not mad at me. So I’m going to move on.

Becca Thomas 20:03
Next.

Kevin Oakley 20:04
Yeah. And when it comes to a franchise situation, obviously scale becomes harder. One company has multiple locations, but then only 16% of franchise franchise locations, were responding to reviews, as opposed to other Google, by far had the most. But Yelp is ranking really well. And this is not homebuilder, specific. But Yelp, as they say, is ranking for 92% of local searches. yelp is showing up. And so yeah, at the end of the day, they’re kind of best, the best practice is simply to make sure you have presence that the account is set up properly, made current and that you are staying active there, which is again, maybe not surprising that most people do it. But the but if you remember two years ago, I think when we did our online survey response example, we use a quality score to figure out what was the kind of quality interaction when people did follow up with a new Home Shopper who’d left information online? How good were those emails how personally were they see people seem to add any type of emotion or caring to it? Well, they ended with one of their own and said out of a possible 100 points in the study. 89 was the highest score in terms of overall account quality. So the highest was 89 McAllister’s Deli, maybe we’ll include them in the show notes, you can check out how awesome they are. It was the best but the average score was 45. And, and again, these they’re just looking at a lot of the basics and that the basics cannot be overstated how important they are and the way that I try to with humor. Say this is I showed two pictures. First, I just show a picture of Kim Kardashian, pre hair and makeup, kind of picture of Kim Kardashian post hair and makeup and say, you know, if Kim is going to do a photoshoot, or she’s going to go out in public for an event. How long does she do the basics I hair and makeup for? And the answer is as long as it takes, right? Yeah, the basics. Mother there a non negotiable must be done well all the time before you are allowed to move on beyond the basics. All right, and next one up is a different one. But I thought it was a fun one too. And this is from MIT Technology Review. And the headline is 10 breakthrough technologies in 2019 curated by none other than a pretty smart guy Bill Gates’s

co founder of Microsoft, worth a couple billion dollars think he and Warren Buffett and Jeff Bezos go back and forth? Or Well, at least, United States. But so you would imagine if you were only a new home marketing, Becca, that this list would be chock full of all things. You know, these are the 10 biggest breakthrough technologies. Well, that’s got to be artificial intelligence, machine learning computer vision chatbots. What else is out there? That’s that’s, that’s big. Facial recognition, software and tracking. Who is attribution modeling, heck, attribution modeling might even be a top 10 breakthrough technology. Who knows? But no.

The list is full of things that are infinitely more important. So this is just a quick, I guess, conversation about what is is really impacting our world is way beyond just what advertisers and marketers are working on. And so the list is full of truly all inspiring things. What you have a you have a favorite among the list. I’ll name I have a couple favorites.

Becca Thomas 23:57
But the one I’m looking at right now is the cow free burger. And yes,

Kevin Oakley 24:03
yeah. Beyond Meat. Amazing company.

Becca Thomas 24:06
Yeah. Because I guess we’re projected by 2050 to be like, true for this specific will consume 70% more meat than in 2005. And yet the single most thing destroying the internet or the internet. The environment is meat production. Yeah. So that’s a biggie.

Kevin Oakley 24:32
Yeah, I mean, how much meat you eat traditionally has been directly tied to how much money you make. And a lot of people don’t eat meat, because they can’t afford it around the world. So as the world’s standard of living increases, that’s the concern is that it’s going to do more and more harm. And so companies like beyond me, and impossible foods, I have not had either one of their burgers, but but it’s pretty ingenious. So beyond meat as an example, I think is the company who they actually add be juice into the burger to make it look like blood to graphic. But people swear that it is and it’s been tested and rolled out in in major brands like McDonald’s and, and other places. So yeah, that one’s cool custom cancer vaccines. This is a gut probe and a pill. So you can literally just swallow this thing. And it’s going to check in on on your gut, make sure it’s good. Predicting premature births and how to handle them better New Wave nuclear power, robot dexterity, new wave nuclear power was interesting. Because, you know, you’ve always grown up with it. It’s not nuclear, nuclear fusion, it’s fission. So now they’re bringing in the fusion to which I was like, I brain hurts. I don’t even know where else to contribute on that. That’s way beyond me. But carbon dioxide catcher, so turning that dockside into a material that can then be removed or used for other purposes. He actually named the Apple Watch which I found interesting, an ECG on your wrist at all times, basically, getting the wearables to be able to but you know, sanitation without sewers, we go on and on. And then at the very bottom of the list is one that’s going to strike a chord with us, which is smooth talking AI assistance, and references Google duplex, which we’ve talked about on the show before opening open AI has things come along and then you’re talking about in China consumers are already getting used to Ali Baba which is like their Amazon Ali me which coordinates package deliveries over the phone and haggles about the price of goods over chat.

Becca Thomas 26:49
Wow.

Kevin Oakley 26:51
So it was just as good. Again, I just resetting your viewpoint on on how all these different technologies are coming that in terms of how it affects humans, this was his prediction, and AI did make the list as a as a talking asst category. So that one caught my attention. The last one here is from Search Engine Journal, as well. And the headline is Instagram analytics guide 10 of the best tools to get insights. So some of you may be asking, don’t we get insights about all this in Google Analytics or Adobe analytics or other places? The answer is sure. But that is what happens once they leave those platforms and come to your world, which is, again, a lot of times the main goal of why we’re doing it in the first place. But the article here it gives and we don’t need to go through all 10 was give you a couple of them. But first kind of breakdown for me, Becca, why? What kind of stuff? Are we even trying to? To learn from some of these tools? What is it trying to tell us what’s happening?

Becca Thomas 27:58
Well, some of these tools are really to help find Instagram influencers, to discover some of the best performing hashtags for your posts, and exert examine your and your competitors popularity and reputation among users.

Kevin Oakley 28:18
Yeah, so for someone who doesn’t care necessarily as much that ever and not that homebuilder should either. But a lot of influencers will do a significant amount of posting that doesn’t have a link, or asking for purchase, right, because they’re trying to create value and not just constantly say, buy this thing that I’m wearing or, or whatever else. And so tools like this can help them analyze and can also help homeowners analyze, well, when is the best time to make an ask type post. versus if I’m just pushing out other types of content, discovering the best performing hashtags, because again, a lot of that, in terms of visibility is not going to translate over to analytics. And basically just what is the consumer doing on Instagram, prior to them leaving again, so. And a lot of this the post talks about is available, it’s just hidden, not not easily discovered. And so the first tool is just Instagram insights itself, which is completely free, shows you how many people were reached by your content breaks down the stats of specific posts, stories and ads gives you demographic data. But it doesn’t keep all the data long term, you can’t choose a custom period of time to see the data from and that data can be exported to analyze somewhere else or cross compared or tabulated with with other data points. And then this most cover the first two after that, that they reference one is called later and it does have a free version and a paid version. Multiple paid versions, this is goes a little bit more robust pulls in some of the actual post images you can get a sense of not just visually with a chart, but also what what was that post look like visually with and try to find correlations between the visual style of that content and performance. Just just goes into a lot more detail. The last one is currently QUINTLY put that one in the show notes for you as well as later. But again, while this is interesting, and I want to share with you, there is a lot of data about what happens way beyond before they leave. Is there anything in here as you look through this article that to you make sure I’m not just being pessimistic? I’m kinda like, I don’t know, is this is a super valuable?

Becca Thomas 30:41
Well, part of me thinks that I still see less expensive results in Facebook over Instagram. Well, but then also, I also really like that you can find out what time of day is the best posts for your engagement.

Kevin Oakley 31:03
Your specific engagement versus someone saying generally, it’s this time of day everyone should post now, what what is the best for your audience?

Becca Thomas 31:11
Yeah, but it’s, it’s I don’t know, I’m kind of like 5050 because one hand, it’s really cool. But on the other hand, I see better results on the Facebook. And it’s easier to see how ads are performing through the ads manager.

Kevin Oakley 31:31
Yep. And this kind of ties in, I guess, to my storytime talk as well, which is just for this one builder, right? They had 111 organic visitors. Most of those were from Facebook, not Instagram. And so how if there’s not a lot of action there currently, you’re really don’t have much data to analyze or learn from either and anytime you have a small set of data, it can be really wrong. Just because you only have three people who saw your thing well that and it tells you your best demographic is this age in male female whatever. Well there are only three people so if two of them were in that group, yeah, you can you can go down the wrong path to so far that under interesting. Not critical. But for those of you want to treat your brand more like an influencer account on Instagram, I think those would be helpful for you. Yeah. All right. That is it. No question of the week, no new question the week No, nothing they’ll do for this week. So Andrew, we hope you get in quickly this weekend and are able to actually relax and enjoy life with the family at home. And Thais hope you’re not too wet and everyone stayed safe. For the rest of you, have fantastic week and we will see you next time. For published articles, blog post videos and more check out DoYouConvert.com and it’s also the best way to find out how to connect with us on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and anywhere else we are online. See you everybody!

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

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