How We’re Helping EternaTurf Install Grass Turf Across The US

EternaTurf is an artificial grass turf company. Their job is to install grass turf for yards, pools, playgrounds, and pets around the country.

When I first met Chris Cathey, EternaTurf’s owner in Sarasota back in February we laid out a gameplan of how we’d get them more calls and help them expand across the country.

Back in February EternaTurf had only two locations, their headquarters in Louisville and new location in Sarasota.

Since then, they’ve put effort into growing a Tampa and Toledo location – with Beaufort, SC and Tucson, AZ close on the way.

The goal for these new locations was simple – get more calls. The good news is that EternaTurf does good work and has happy clients we can pull from, as this is the prerequisite for all local service businesses to grow.

There’s a short-term and a long-term play for growing local service businesses online.

This is important because any agency or guru promising you 100 quality calls in the first month is almost always lying. At the same time, folks promising you 10,000 backlinks is also too good to be true, as this violates Google’s TOS and results in being punished longterm for SEO.

The trick is to do both simultaneously. To build out EternaTurf’s website SEO over time while also generating calls in the short term so these locations can grow.

The priority for us now and then is to generate high quality calls from potential customers looking to install artificial grass turf for their home.

In this article, we’ll walk you through what we’re doing to generate calls in the short term, and long term play to make EternaTurf a household name in the landscaping and turf industry.

What are we doing to generate calls now?

The short answer is local service ads. If you’re unaware, LSA (local service ads) are a way for local service businesses to generate calls in their service areas. You can think of this like Google PPC but instead of paying per click, we’re paying per call.

This is insanely powerful because we can directly connect would-be customers with local service businesses. And if they’re not a good fit, we can easily dispute the leads and save money.

There’s many categories in which businesses qualify for local service ads, from fields like plumbers and HVAC to services like CPAs. Luckily, one of the newest additions to Google LSAs include artificial turf installation.

So our first step was to set up LSA in Louisville and Sarasota, along with CallRail to measure the quality of these calls + where they’re coming from.

This is an important step because we want to differentiate between organic and paid calls and hear back the conversation.

Since launching LSA, we’ve slowly trickled up all of our paid calls for our locations – including EternaTurf Tampa which just recently opened. And within the first day, already had 3 qualified leads in from people wanting turf installs around Tampa Bay.

PPC ads are also playing support for driving incremental lead volume – but LSA is doing the heavy lifting here.

What about organic calls?

For organic calls, we’re relying on our Google business profile and our website. To get this started for our Tampa and Toledo locations, we had to get reviews in the door and upload images of contractors doing work.

To do that, we had our Tampa location reach out to recent customers who were happy with their turf installs and ask them to leave a review. We also asked them to upload at least 50 images of their work if possible.

In just 3 weeks, they were able to get 7 verified reviews in the door and add images of their work. And while it does take time for us to start showing up organically, this is how we build a GMB from scratch doing things the right way.

We can also look at our Sarasota location for more proof that this strategy, while more of a long-term play, works for generating quality organic calls.

 

The trick with GMBs (Google business profiles) and any other form of organic marketing is to share stories and proof that you do a good job in the area you operate in. This includes before and after videos, images, and reviews.

Digital marketing is all about amplifying what’s already working for you, and it’s borderline impossible to scale a business they way we want to without that underlying factor.

What’s your long term play to grow EternaTurf?

 

Long Term we want to incredibly get lead volume from happy customers and organic searches. This means when someone types in “Artificial turf tampa”, we show up.

As my friend Dennis Yu say’s, you can’t “do” SEO anymore than you can “do” weight loss. It’s the process of putting the right ingredients in over time which get’s you the results you want. In our case, ranking on relevant keywords.

This isn’t done by buying backlinks or doing anything spammy. Rather, it’s about creating the best customer experience possible. This is done through EternaTurf writing about things customers want to know related to artificial grass turf. It’s about blogs like this one writing articles which are relevant to Chris Cathey and EternaTurf.

EternaTurf can also use the geo-grid and network with other Tampa businesses, like our friends at Oasis IV Therapy. As long as they match the location of the service business and are in a different industry, this is a fantastic strategy to boost our local rankings.

Even though the long term play is to build organic keywords, there are things we can do to help expedite the process. For example, if a business like EternaTurf Tampa has multiple LSP (local service pages), we want to give them traffic based off location.

This confirms to Google that the business is legitimate. For example, if I’m a homeowner in Lakeland, FL, a city outside Tampa, and click on EternaTurf’s Lakeland LSP – this a signal that the right people are visiting the right page.

This is because Google wants to optimize for the best possible customer experience. And if users from x area visit x page for that area and have a good experience, that means that the page is achieving its goals and deserves to rank higher.

The way we can help that along is by running dollar-a-day Facebook ads targeting each individual location.

This not only gets us super cheap clicks because of the high relevance, but also benefits our SEO to rank higher where we want to. This kills 2 birds with one stone and it’s how we get Davis Islands homeowners to click on our ads for $0.22/click and book calls, while also boosting our SEO over time.

The fundamentals for EternaTurf work for any other local service business.

I’m optimistic about working with EternaTurf because they’re a good business that does good work. And as a result, we’re already generating their Tampa location 30 calls a month more and counting. We’re also starting to generate more calls from scratch and increasing their SEO over time.

But if EternaTurf didn’t do good work – none of this would matter. Just like how if some guru wants to scam customers – there’s only so much digital marketing you can do before you’re called out for it and lose your audience.

The fundamentals have always been to do good work and build a solid reputation. If the internet didn’t exist, you’d follow that same framework to grow your business.

As EternaTurf continues to stack up locations and grow, we’re excited to be apart of the journey and deliver the best results possible at Analytic Aim.