Classic Cleanouts: 4.5X Increase In Organic Traffic
Sept 1
Introduction
Junk removal is an extremely competitive industry that is unfortunately dominated by large franchises. That being said, it is possible to beat them out in your service area, if you use the right strategies, techniques, and sales funnels.
Here at Develop Digital Media, we specialize in helping junk removal companies dominate their local competition using cutting edge digital strategies, coupled with powerful process automation.
Today we would like to share with you the incredible success story of Classic Cleanouts, who are a long term client with us. Here is a quick look at just some of the results we were able to achieve for them in just the first couple of months.
When Classic Cleanouts first started working with us, the main issue they were having that was preventing them from scaling was that they were spending too much money and time trying to acquire new leads.
The owner of Classic Cleanouts, Ron Diemer, said “How am I supposed to grow my business if I am spending all of my time and money chasing down new customers?”
Unfortunately, the cold hard truth to this dilemma is that if you continue to do things the way you are, then you will never be able to scale your business into the junk removal company of your dreams.
Fortunately, this is a very common problem we see all the time in the junk removal space. We find that is can be so competitive in certain areas that unless you deploy the right strategies you will be forced to spend far too much time and money trying to acquire the business you need to grow. In order to solve this critical issue, we attacked the problem from 3 different areas.
Table of Contents
Design A Website Built To Convert
Every great system needs to be built on a solid foundation. In the junk removal space, a high converting website should be the foundation of everything you do online. If done correctly YOUR WEBSITE WILL SELL FOR YOU!
We don’t mean to hurt your eyes with the all caps, but seriously, we cannot stress how important your website is. It can be the difference between spending $500 in ads for 1 phone call vs spending $100 in ads for 5 phone calls. That is just scratching the surface of what a well thought out and strategically designed website can do for your junk removal business.
To illustrate this point further, let’s take a look at the before and after of Classic Cleanouts.
Before
After
The fact that simple screen shots of the top of the homepage is able to provide such a shock is testament to the value a website can bring to your business.
To provide more detail, let’s break down what actually makes this website so effective.
Call to Actions Displayed Strategically Throughout the Website
Every website should have a desired action they want their customers to take when they first come to the site. In short, inspired call to actions are a simple yet effective way to get potential customers to take that action. For Classic Cleanouts, the main call to action is that we want them to order a dumpster online using the new dumpster rental booking system.
Well Placed Forms
Forms should be placed in very visible areas on a multitude of pages. Not every person comes to your website ready to become a customer, however, when they make that decision you don’t want them to have to think about where to go.
Thoughtful Navigation
You do not want to bog down the main menu with too many options. An overwhelming header can cause a high bounce rate, due to the difficulty of navigation.
Classic Cleanouts offers a wide variety of services, so when designing the main menu, we needed to be very calculated. In the end, we created a mega-menu underneath the services tab and nestled all of the services there, in a very organized fashion. This keeps the main menu reserved for only the most important actions and pages we want the customers to navigate towards.
Content Marketing
Ok, so now we have an engaging website with strategic copy and call to actions aimed to convert casual browsers into hot leads. That is a great start, but what about the rest of the content?
The rest of the content on the website is focused around educating customers about junk removal, dumpster rental, demolition, and all the other services that Classic Cleanouts provides.
Why educate people on our website? Can’t they just call and find out more information that way?
In short, they can, but most of them won’t. Instead they will go to the next junk removal website and see if that website answers their question. In the end, a customer will go to whoever answer can answer their question first.
This is because answering your customers questions in a transparent way through your website’s content builds trust! People don’t buy from people they don’t trust, simple as that.
A customer who has read 10 pages of thoughtful educational content on your website would not dream of contacting any other junk removal business. You have earned their trust and you will be rewarded for that.
Additionally, these educational pages will have the ability to rank in Google for various profitable keywords, hence driving even more customers to your website. An example of this would be a page talking specifically about appliance removal in the city of Boston. Now when someone searches “appliance removal in Boston”, they will find your website, proceed to educate themselves, and then pick up the phone and call your business.
That is just the power of one page! Now imagine what you you can do with 10 or even 100 more pages focused around educating your customers.
The reason Classic Cleanouts has been so successful is because they are playing towards winning in the long run, opposed to investing in quick wins that contribute no long term value or stability to their business.
Driving Traffic to the New Website That is Optimized for Conversion
Now that we have created a new website that will act as our lead generation machine, we need to drive as much traffic to it as possible and let it work its magic. We focused on several different avenues to acquire this much desired traffic.
Local SEO
Local SEO is a huge opportunity for your junk removal business because when you acquire clicks through organic google search, they are 100% free of charge. Let me be clear, driving organic traffic to a website that is built to sell, is literally free money for your business.
In just 5 months, we were able to increase Classic Cleanouts organic traffic by 450%!
Here are some graphs illustrating the success of our local SEO campaign.
Traffic
Visibility
GMB Creation/Optimization
GMB or Google My Business is one of the most effective yet underutilized assets available to junk removal business owners.
Sitting in the top 3 of the map pack is a huge opportunity to get calls when people search for businesses in your area.
Just like Google organic, calls and searches where your GMB appears are 100% free.
Yes, that is correct, another opportunity for free money for your business.
As part of our strategy we like to build, optimize, and rank GMB’s for all of your service locations to ensure that you are not missing any opportunities to appear at the top of the page when someone is searching for a junk removal company near them.
As mentioned a million times by now, the junk removal industry is extremely competitive so it is critical that you take every opportunity you have to appear at the top of the page when people are looking for junk removal companies near them.
Google Local Service Ads
Google local service ads are another fantastic opportunity for your business to show up at the top of the page that we would highly recommend taking advantage of.
Unlike regular Google Ads, you only get charged for actual leads, opposed to clicks.
Paying for clicks is also good, but paying for the lead itself really takes it to the next level because you are one step further in the overall sales process.
Additionally, Google performs background checks on all businesses who wish to use these types of ads, which ensures that only real businesses can qualify for these spots.
This is extremely important for junk removal because there are so many lead generation businesses out there that will not be able to qualify for these spots.
Yes, that’s right, this is your chance to finally get a leg up on all those pesky lead generation companies stealing your business.
Google PPC
If you want targeted junk removal traffic and you want it RIGHT NOW, there are few better ways to accomplish this than with a well structured Google PPC campaign.
Google ads sometimes get a bad wrap, especially in competitive industries like junk removal.
In order for you to run profitable Google Ads, it is vital that you have a website that is built to convert.
That being said, if you have been following along in this case study, you will know that the very first thing we did was turn the Classic Cleanouts website into a lead generation machine!
If you take a look at the graph below, look at what happened to the total conversions once we released the new website in February.
Now, when we drive traffic to the website using PPC, we are making sure it has the absolute best chance of converting possible. This will ultimately bring us more leads for less money!
Further, a solid Google PPC strategy can work in tandem with your local SEO strategy, further increasing your organic growth overtime.
Yes, you read that correctly, not only are you getting more leads for less money, but you are also going to get more of that free traffic that we know you love.
Finally, let’s talk about the scalability of this strategy. Once we have achieved ads that are actually profitable for you, the next step is to increase the budget of your campaign, utilizing your maximum allotted ad budget.
So, let’s say you want to get another truck, or perhaps some more dumpsters. All you need to do is increase your ad spend and you will get enough business to make use of that new equipment! Now, isn’t that the definition of scalability right there.
Business Mailers
Sometimes, the simplest strategies work the best. One of the tactics that worked well with Classic Cleanouts was blanketing their service area with mailers advertising their business. Of course coupons were included as well.
Potential customers would see the mailer and then check out the Classic Cleanouts website. With the new website specializing in turning cold leads into customers, we saw a huge increase in business, which all started with one simple piece of paper in the mail.
Build Automated Systems
Process automation is extremely important because it allows you to scale your business efficiently. If more leads create more process for you, you are essentially capping the growth of your business.
If you can create a situation in which more leads DOES NOT create more process, then there is no ceiling on how large you can grow.
With that important fact in mind, let’s go over the important process automations that we put in place for Classic Cleanouts to ensure that they could grow their business as efficiently as possible.
A Powerful Online Sales Funnel
At this point in time, Classic Cleanouts had traffic coming in from all different directions. We needed a way to funnel that traffic into a system that required as little manual intervention as possible.
With that in mind, we created the ultimate dumpster rental sales funnel that takes potential customers from a sales page, all the way to check out, where they can pay with credit card.
So, how does this sales funnel work?
The Sales Page
The start of any good sales funnel, of course, is an appealing sales page that presents an attractive offer.
In this case, the offer was that if you checkout online, you will save 5% off your dumpster rental, along with 20% off all weight thrown in the dumpster.
From there, we crafted the perfect sales page, filled with excellent copy, testimonials, and of course, call to actions.
A Revolutionary Dumpster Booking System
Upon clicking one of the many call to actions on the sales page, leads will be funneled into our revolutionary dumpster booking system. We describe it as revolutionary because it has solved the two biggest customer complaints in the dumpster rental industry.
1) The rental process is too confusing.
2) Getting charged additional fees after the dumpster rental.
Here’s how it works:
First, customers select their dumpster size. After that, they select how many days they want it for, and how much weight they want to put in it.
Using that information, the price is dynamically calculated, and the customers can proceed to book and pay for their dumpster right online!
Using this system, customers are no longer confused because they can play around with the dates and weights, and watch the price change right in front of them. Additionally, by paying upfront, they no longer are scared of being charged after their rental is complete.
By creating an easy booking process that requires no human intervention, you are establishing a bottleneck free sales strategy that can scale indefinitely.
Review Generation/Reputation Management
With so much junk removal competition, customers have a lot of companies to choose from.
In order to help decide who to give their business to, customers will oftentimes turn to online reviews.
You will steal customers from your competition if you have more 5 star reviews than them, simple as that.
Ok, so if we know more reviews are better, the question becomes how do we get these reviews? And, if you have been reading along, you will probably guess by now that the most important thing about this process is that it needs to be automated so that it can scale with the business.
In order to accomplish this, we created a system that will take all of the Classic Cleanouts customers, and perform automated outreach at optimal times, asking for reviews.
Of course every outreach includes a handy link that will bring them right to a review form.
With this strategy Classic Cleanouts went from about 1 review every 3 months, to 6-8 reviews a month. Considering most businesses only have about 10-12 reviews on Google, you can see how quickly they were able to overtake their competition.
Even with just a quick glance at the photo above, it is very easy to see which is the most attractive
option in the search.
Conclusion
If you have followed through to the end of this case study, you have probably learned that marketing junk removal is more complicated than you initially thought. This is because, in reality, it is not just marketing we are trying to achieve.
We are building systems that will allow you to scale your junk removal business indefinitely over time.
Since working with us, Classic Cleanouts has seen a consistent increase in business. Further, with the addition of powerful automated systems, they are spending less time chasing down leads and more time servicing their customers.
This has led to a more positive customer experience, as well as a significantly less hectic work environment.
In the future, we will continue to expand and build upon the incredible foundation that we have created.
With the business steadily growing each month, and automated systems built to handle the increasing customer base, there is truly nothing standing in Classic Cleanout’s way from becoming one of the largest junk removal companies in Massachusetts and New Hampshire.
Not every junk removal company will require the same strategies and automated systems. Our job is to find out your story and struggles as a junk removal business and help you do what is right for you.
We encourage you to take the lessons learned and the concepts applied away from this case study and implement them within business. And of course, if you need any help along the way, you know where to find us.
