My wife and I decided that we would get a new TV for our birthday presents this year. (Our birthdays are only a month apart.) So I did what any sane person would do: Obsessive research on a new TV. And I mean OBSESSIVE. (Oh, that's not normal? By the way, rtings.com is an amazing resource if you want an unbiased review of TVs.) Well, first we went to Best Buy to see if we could get lucky with any open box deals. Nada. Instead the young salesman tried to sell us probably the worst rated TV they had. So we went home and my search began. I stumbled across a Panasonic TV in our price range. Hadn't heard of them in years but knew they make good stuff. This was probably the best bang for buck TV I've ever seen based on the reviews I found. I wanted to wait a bit longer to see if the price would drop more since the super bowl is coming up. But the price actually went UP. After even more research, and even upping my budget a bit, I still decided to go with the Panasonic. Only problem: they were now sold out everywhere. Luckily other TVs started going on sale. Long story short, I ended up finding something that was even higher rated than the Panasonic for only a couple hundred more. (But then we had to wait 30 minutes and ask twice for help when we went back to Best Buy to buy it.) I still can't help but doubt my decision. Certain shows look grainy. I constantly adjust the settings. I think the better processing of the Panasonic would've been better. Oh well. Why am I even telling you all of this? Because I learned at least 6 things about business during this experience. Every step of the way. From deciding to get a new TV all the way to installation. And over the next 6 days I'm going to explain how you can learn from my obsessive behavior to do better in your own business. This post has gotten pretty long, so I'll start tomorrow with what I learned from my research phase and how that will help your business stand out when your customers start their research process.

Ever realize that you're good at helping other people but not yourself? Sometimes you're so involved with your business, you don't know what to actually focus on to move the needle. It can be hard to take a step back and look at your own business objectively. I know I'm that way with my business. But I know what to look for in other people's businesses. Which is why I'm opening up a couple audit spots this month. We'll take a look at your online presence, lead handling, and back end systems to help you find and fix any inefficiencies so you can get more phone calls and book more jobs consistently. Reply below to claim your audit. I have very limited availability for this, so act fast.

I went to update my GBP yesterday and noticed a new feature that allows you to add descriptions and pricing to your services (see attached screenshot). Honestly not sure if this is that new or not but I just noticed it. Knowing Google, they seem to like businesses that fill out every little detail in their GBP. So I would recommend checking your listed services, add descriptions and pricing (if applicable), then adding any other services you may not have listed yet and do the same for those. If this is actually a new feature, you may even get a leg up on your competition until they notice this as well.

Part of the "Local Visibility Trifecta" that I mention is optimizing your website. Part of that website optimization is some basic SEO stuff. The hardest part of SEO is the keyword research. I use a software called xagio that makes it super easy. Xagio isn't free, but I have an account and I'm happy to run an audit on your site and on one of your competitor's sites to show you: - what you're ranking for - what your competitor is ranking for - and what to do to optimize your pages to rank higher. The report will look something like the image attached showing different keywords and which are the low hanging fruit (gold bars are super low hanging fruit to target). Let me know if you're interested and I'll run a quick audit of your site.