Aaron Shishilla on What Pest Control Websites Get Wrong and Why They Still Matter

00:00 Dan Leibrandt

Hey there and welcome back to Pest Control Legends. I'm your host, Dan Leibrandt, and today I'm with Aaron Shishilla. If you don't already know Aaron, he's the CEO and founder of WolfPack Advising, a seven-figure digital marketing agency serving inspectors, pest control, and more. Despite only being in business for six years, WolfPack has grown to over 100 clients, gotten over 90 five-star Google reviews, and even won the Best of Florida Award for Digital Marketing in 2023. Aaron is also a recognized national speaker and the founder of the WolfPack Summit, an annual conference for inspectors and pest control. Now, in this episode, we're going to dive into everything you need to know about building a successful pest control website, as that's where Aaron got started and where many pest control companies go wrong. So without further ado, thanks for coming on the show, Aaron.

00:47 Aaron Shishilla

Thanks for having me, Dan.

00:49 Dan Leibrandt

Absolutely. I want to actually I'd like to talk about the beginning of your journey because it's funny at like I told you before the show we actually have a pretty similar background that You know your dad has a inspection company My dad has a flooring company Talk to me about how you started at your dad's inspection company and how you got started on his website and other things like that...

01:11 Aaron Shishilla

Yeah, do you want the full background story or should we keep it? Mean, I mean like because I can share the funny stuff okay, all right full story is and I love sharing this story because I feel like a lot of people think I'm exaggerating here But I'm dead serious it a hundred percent happened a hundred percent true. I had no Thoughts going into home inspections, which is what my dad did They also own a pest control company in a roofing company and of course...

01:18 Dan Leibrandt

Yeah, yeah, no, share the full story, that's a good one.

01:39 Aaron Shishilla

No person, I guess, finds them finds themselves doing pest control or wants to do pest control. They just somehow land in it. And that's exactly what happened to me. So I ended up working at a grocery store called Publix. It's in the southeast of the United States. And I worked in the deli. Just happened because I moved back home after college or still going to college while I was paying my way through. And I was going to be like a doctor. I was going to be an engineer. And then I just landed on business because I just found that as my niche, I guess. Anyway. Was at this grocery store for about a year, did a good job, and I was still going to college. And one day there was about a 30 year old man that was there and I was 18 at the time. I look like I'm 18 now. I'm telling you, I probably looked like I was 12 then. And I was just sweeping in the back hallway. And while I was sweeping in the back hallway, this guy comes up and he like steps in my dirt pile. You know how you can like step and squash in a dirt pile to kind of like mess it up a little bit. He didn't like make it all over the place. It's not like it went everywhere, but he was like, just joking around as you would when you work at a grocery store and you're in the back hallway. So I was like, okay, I'm going to joke with him back and he's going in the freezer. So I'm going to kind of close the door on him when he's going in the freezer. So that way he can't get out. It's pretty chilly in there, but that's all it's going to do anyway. So he goes in the freezer. I'm going to close the door. Well, supposedly he's coming out of the freezer and you're not supposed to do this. They show you in all the HR videos. You're supposed to carry the boxes of chicken right up next to you to your hips.

03:06 Aaron Shishilla

Bend with the knees, you know, don't don't arch your back that kind of stuff. This dude flung it over his shoulder like he wasn't supposed to and let out the door of the freezer with his head first. It just so happened that I was closing the door right when he was coming out and his head was coming out first. So I hit him in the head with this solid door and it I don't think it was like a steel solid door. It was made out of metal on the exterior. Pretty sure on the inside it was probably just foam and insulated. And it wasn't that big of a deal. But this dude. I'm telling you flipped like I guess he had some sort of anger issues or something because I thought we were just joking around. He starts yelling at me backing me up against the wall pointing at me, you know, kind of towering over me and just yelling at me for saying that I hit him in this head with the door and I did it on purpose and I was trying to hurt him. And you know, I don't know what you say to that because I was just like, dude, I'm sorry. We were joking around. It wasn't that big of a deal like I'm like, we were just both joking around. I'm sorry. Like, what else do want me to say to you? But he's still screaming at me for like five, 10 minutes. And I'm not even kidding in the back hallway. And finally, I guess like something like calmed him down or whatever, because he went to turn around and like leave. So he turns around and he goes to leave. And I'm like, all right, I guess that's it. Whatever. I just got my ass chewed out for for whatever. And we'll move on. But no lie, he took one step away from me like he was walking away.

04:34 Aaron Shishilla

And he got down like notched on his knees and then turn around and swung at me when I was totally not paying attention and hit me right in the nuts. So to this day, I still haven't gotten tested to know if I can have kids or not. I hope...

04:42 Dan Leibrandt

Hahaha no.

04:46 Aaron Shishilla

I'm all good. I should be, I think. But yeah, he literally punched me in the nuts as hard as he could and then walked away. Like didn't even continue fighting or anything like that. And I wasn't going to sit there and throw hands. And I kind of thought to myself, well, If he feels like that anger from me hitting him in the head, like, does it hurt that bad or something, you know, even though I was apologizing, it was an accident. He got his payback towards me, I guess, in a way. 10, 20 minutes later, nothing's happening. We're avoiding each other. And he finds me in the back hallway again. And this time he's screaming at me again. And mind you, this guy is like 30 years old and I am 18. I look like a 12 year old. OK.

05:29 Dan Leibrandt

Hahaha...

05:30 Aaron Shishilla

And he's yelling at me and he says like come on Let's settle this like men in this office because there's no cameras in the office So he wants to fight me in this back office and I'm like, dude, I'm not fighting you like this is stupid Like it was an accident. What are you talking about? Like you're going off the deep end man, and He's like fine. You want me to get a manager? I was like sure go get a manager if that's what you need to do. Behold manager shows up sits us both down and is just like Aaron and if you report this, I got to take it to HR. I can't do anything about it. You know, we're a big company. I'm just going to report it to HR. HR is not going to care about either side. They're just going to fire you both. So is that what you want to see happen? Do you want to see, you know, Mike get fired? Let's call them Mike. I was just like, of course, of course not. This is stupid. Like it was a complete accident. We were joking around. I didn't do it on purpose. He punched me in the nuts back. I kind of feel like he kind of got the better end of the deal here. Like, let's just move on. And Mike goes to her question, because she says to him, says to Mike, Mike, do you want to see Aaron get fired? You know, and you're going to get fired too. Do you want that? Mike goes, yeah, yeah, I want that. I want to see Aaron get fired. He hit me in the head with a metal door. And that was his exact words. Lo and behold, a week or two later, I ended up getting fired. Big surprise.

06:49 Dan Leibrandt

Ha!

06:58 Aaron Shishilla

I remember I was in the truck with my dad and he drove me there for whatever reason. Had my own car, but he drove me there and I remember the conversation sitting in the passenger seat and he looked over to me and he said, you know, maybe maybe you can have a job with us. Maybe you can just come over because I kind of knew I was going to get fired. And I was like, yeah, maybe, you know, not really thinking too much of it, but thinking like, well, you know, I need I need something to do. And that was the next day was my first day as a home inspector. And I became one of the youngest home inspectors in the state of Florida. I did that for two years. And now we're here in digital marketing world because my parents hired a digital marketing agency at that time that really sucked. I always loved marketing, especially in college, that side of the business. It was just always a challenge. As you know, Dan, things change so much, especially in SEO. Things are constantly changing. So I really enjoyed that. And a lot of marketing agencies at the time and even to this day have really poor communication. Don't show the exact return on investment and overall just cost way too much money for no results that they're producing. And that's exactly the situation my parents found themselves in. They spent a ton of money for a website that was subpar, paid for a bunch of SEO that Dan, I'm sure you're all too familiar with these stories where they pay a bunch of money for SEO with zero communication. Maybe they're using a ton of different strategies that don't actually work or outdated. And... My dad and I ended up after like a year sitting down together to work on the website together, do SEO together. And that's kind of where I got my start is working in their particular business as a home inspector and ended up doing it for their pest control company. But I had so much fun with it and so much passion that I helped other companies in the state of Florida with their own digital marketing, with their own website, and ended up getting a marketing and sales manager job for another company.

08:53 Aaron Shishilla

And that was at a young age. I want to say I was like 22 at the time. So now I was managing some people and I was doing it for a multi-million dollar business, a home service business. And I had a lot of fun with that too. But at the time as well, I was still helping a ton of people on the side. And I had WolfPack Advising on the side. That's what we've been around for six years, but I've only taken it seriously for the last three. Because all throughout then I was just doing it as a side hustle. And at some point it just turn with me that, hey, maybe I can turn this into a full-time gig and just 100 % do that. So here we are. Mean, the last few years, we've just been absolutely crushing it, I guess. And that's the story. That's the mission. That's why we do it. I understand the pain that a lot of these home service-based businesses go through, pest control companies especially, and a lot of the false promises and bad communication and high costs that they see with digital marketing. So we try to make sure that it's very... We communicate a lot and all the details are kind of outlined to see the exact return on investment from it. I probably went a little bit too much in detail, but hopefully that's my story, Dan.

09:59 Dan Leibrandt

No, no, you're good. Love it. And I love that story. I've listened to several podcasts that you've been on and I've heard that several times now. It's so funny that basically if you didn't get punched in the balls, maybe you wouldn't have started this agency today. That's really crazy to think about. That's really, that's even more impressive that you've only been going hard in the agency for the past three years or so, given that, you guys have all these reviews and clients and all of that stuff. It's really impressive. Like I've already told you, really hats off to you. You're doing a great job.

10:29 Aaron Shishilla

Thank you so much. You as well, I'm impressed.

10:30 Dan Leibrandt

Of course, yeah, I appreciate it. Yeah. Okay, so let's jump into the website stuff. So I wanna cover everything website related or at least as much time as we have. First off, I wanna just get very general. And also I like talking about website stuff with you here because I know that's kind of where you started out. I know that you were working for your dad's company and being an inspector, but one of the first things that you're doing for your dad and... For your original clients was website design and website building and such. So I feel like it's very relevant to you and me actually, because that's, pretty similar to my origin story. So first off, I'd like you to explain why are websites so important? Most people know they need a website, but what is actually the utility of a website? Why do you need one? Why do you need a good one?

11:16 Aaron Shishilla

Yeah, I get this question quite a bit and a lot of people don't understand and the way that I kind of explain it to a lot of our clients or even just anybody in general that's kind of interested is think of your personal home and you invite guests over to your personal home. You want to make sure that it's clean, it's neat, it's organized. It's a representation of you and your family. So your website is the same deal. I know it's a little bit dramatic, but... When people are visiting your website, that's a place for people to visit, like who you are, who your company is. So it needs to be clean, neat, organized and look well. It needs to show the core values that you as a business exhibit, even if it's just yourself right now, it needs to show that. So when you kind of explain it in that kind of way, it's not necessarily like it's a, you could frame it as a retail front, but if you really think about it's honestly just a digital retail front. It's a place for people to come and kind of visit. And get a feel and a vibe for who you are and obviously a place for them to convert. So implementing some conversion rate optimization in there is important.

12:17 Dan Leibrandt

I love that analogy and it's so interesting because one of my friends actually runs his dad's construction company and he's talking to me all about houses and okay, well we look at you know, he drives around and always is looking at like, okay these houses need to be rebuilt and well this one doesn't have this and that or it needs a certain amount of rooms or we need this amount of garages. I'm like dang, that's kind of the same thing as websites. See just the way as he can look at bad houses in the neighborhood and say that one needs to be rebuilt. The same way I can look at websites and be like, that one needs to be rebuilt. It's such a crazy analogy, but I totally see the overlap.

12:53 Aaron Shishilla

Yeah, 100%. And I'm sure pest control company guys go out to, and I'm starting to do it too, I'm really bad. You go out to a restaurant and you see all the rat traps laying around or how they're being utilized or if they're being serviced. I've seen those humor posts all the time. So it's the same thing that like in home inspections we see by driving around homes or you're looking at your personal house and you're just like, damn it, I really need to fix that. So I totally relate to you in that.

13:15 Dan Leibrandt

Yeah, yeah. 100%. Now tell me, and actually this is funny, I was gonna relate this to a series that you just started, which I forget what it's called, but something of like you roasting people's websites. So you're now doing a series on it, and I'm sure you've seen hundreds of different websites, everything that goes wrong. What are some of the most common mistakes that pest control owners and maybe other home services make on their websites?

13:42 Aaron Shishilla

Oof, common mistakes. You know, I think some of my favorite most common mistakes that I see is a lot of people, and there's nothing, I guess, inherently wrong with this if you're getting started, right? But a lot of people go with something like a Wix or a Squarespace site, and they build it themselves with no kind of perception in terms of if it's good or not, or what they need to be doing. So there's a ton of websites out there. That just overall could use a big kind of cleanup and overhaul to structure it in the right way. Things like if you were to imagine you pull it up a website on your phone, even an easy call to action or call button or schedule button, book button, whatever it is in the top right next to the menu, something that's easily clickable. Or when you're thinking about just the headline and people scrolling, a lot of times what happens and even Google talks about this too is above the fold content. Ensuring before people can scroll, they can get a very clear idea of who you are, what you do, where you're located. And then they can see like either some trust badges like Google reviews or like a Google Guaranteed badge and then a book or a contact button. So when I'm roasting these websites in this series that just started, I'm having tons of fun because people are voluntarily commenting their website and I kind of get to just take my anger out and lay into their website a little bit. So I'm enjoying that and that I would say by far it's the homepage that is super critical that a lot of people just mess up because they do it themselves. They kind of don't understand if anything, if you're just getting a website like put something up obviously, but a web's design cost isn't as much as you might expect. Just hire somebody to do like a nice couple pages for you. Pay like whatever it is to...

15:03 Dan Leibrandt

That's hilarious.

15:29 Aaron Shishilla

To do and that way you know it's clean, professional and neat and three to five years later when you're ready for the next step you can pay for that.

15:36 Dan Leibrandt

Yeah, awesome, I agree. So you mentioned the homepage is super important. Tell me more about that. What do you need on your homepage? What should that look like?

15:44 Aaron Shishilla

Yeah, so as I mentioned, the first top, a lot of people, what they call is a hero section of that. So big, nice, big background image. Maybe they add a video. Don't add video on mobile devices. Keep it to static images. Don't do any type of animations on mobile devices because we're all optimizing for speed. But when we're thinking about web design, we're thinking mobile first. Over 50 % of the traffic nowadays is on mobile devices. And that's what even Google is optimizing for. So when I'm talking about everything, I'm talking about it in relevance to a mobile device. So the first thing. The first title or that headline that H1 tag heading one tag we can call it needs to have not necessarily your brand name. It can have like a nice slogan to you, but it's very critical that you make it super relevant to or towards your service and whatever service area. So pest control in city as an example, then you can add a nice little subheading after that. And that's where after that you add your call to action and all your USPs or unique. Unique value propositions, UVPs, whatever you want to call it. Add those items on usually on the far right hand side, you can add it like a nice background image or whatever else. As you scroll, add more unique value, add your services and links to all your service pages. With Pest Control, you have a lot of services. So you need to make sure that you're linking all of your service pages from the homepage. So a lot of people do like little blocks, icon blocks, or blocks with different images and different columns. That links to all their different services because you not just do pest control, you might do rodent exclusion, might do termite treatments, you might do termite inspections. And obviously Dan, as you know, the more pages that you have that are optimized for a particular service, the better optimization that you're going to get. After you scroll down a little bit further, that's where a lot of times you're seeing links to your blogs, so your content, or reading more about us. At the footer, generally, we want one last call to action before we actually get to the footer content of the website, which is where you're doing things like your resources or your contact stuff. But the most critical thing that I see a lot of is we don't have a call to action on the bottom. And on the top right, we need some type of sticky header that shows, hey, they can call, they can book immediately, whatever it is to always make it easy. One of the cool tricks that I like to implement too is making sure that every call to action is the same color.

18:04 Aaron Shishilla

That way it's consistent across and you have nice contrasting colors. These are things that we talk about in terms of ADA compliance. So Americans with Disabilities Act, making sure that even people who are colorblind can see all the different call to actions.

18:18 Dan Leibrandt

Love that, okay. So a big part of it is optimizing for conversions. You wanna make sure that people that are landing on the page, it's as easy as possible for them to become a customer as possible.

18:30 Aaron Shishilla

Absolutely. There are cases where some companies can go super heavy on the design. And I think there's a balance between the two where you can go super heavy in the design and make it super unique and creative and awesome. I would lean in terms of a pest control company, I would lean more towards the side of keeping it super functional and focus on the conversion rate optimization. If you're leaning heavily in towards digital marketing, because you want people to land on the site, you want it to be super fast, and you want them to convert into the lead.

19:01 Dan Leibrandt

Love it. And then what about the other pages on the site? So just for maybe some more context if people aren't familiar I like a lot of people a lot of pest control owners will tell me like hey rank me number one on Google But I'm like, well, you know, there's a little bit more nuance of like is it your website as your Google Business Profile? What keywords what pages? So the first thing to understand here is that your website is a collection of pages. It's not just one page It's not just your home page is not just the only page your your website is a collection of many different pages. So relating to the question I was gonna ask you, what other pages do you need on your Pest Control site? Do you need a Pest Library? Do you need service pages? What are the core ones that you definitely need?

19:42 Aaron Shishilla

Yeah, the core ones that you're going to need, obviously you're going to need your homepage. You're going to need some type of schedule page or contact page. I typically like to have a difference between the schedule versus contact. So contact is a simple contact form to contact the office, right? Or an admin side where the schedule page is usually where you have your online scheduler, like a FieldRoutes connection or anything like that to where people could just book now. Or it submits in a specific format that you want where it's related to the service. And the job, the property address and has those fields and attributes there. So you're going to need your homepage. I like to have a contact and the schedule page. The other two things that I feel like you can just use templates for terms of use and privacy policies. There's a really simple to add as terms of use and a privacy policy to your website. They aren't necessarily required if you're just going to get started, but it's a good thing to add adds a little bit of professionalism to your site. After that, that's where you start getting to the fun pages. So you're also going to need an about page. About page is really good to kind of expand more on about your particular company and give a little bit more detail that you're not able to completely offer on the homepage. So you can add things like your team pictures so people can understand who are the technicians that are coming out to service my home or what are some of the what is this company particularly about? Why are you a differentiator in my given market? Then you brought up a good point in terms of service areas. I like having a service area page, especially if you service like a large metro. Because now you start talking in the SEO world where you can optimize for certain locations. So service area page supercritical. And I'm going in this order is kind of an order of importance as you continue to grow because as you add more pages, obviously it's more work for a designer and the higher the cost. So keep that in mind. Service area page supercritical. And then you start talking about these services pages. So as you mentioned, Dan, this is a collection of pages. And as we build more pages, we're getting further optimization for Google. We're giving more detail for the consumer when they're leading or landing on the page. And they're able to relate to more of the language that they see there rather than maybe they land on your website and they just see pest control services. But they're specifically looking for something about spiders and that you guys service spiders or rodents. So if you're able to do that and expand on that, then you can expand on your services by having a little drop down to have information, maybe.

22:06 Aaron Shishilla

That you do general pest control, right? But maybe you also do termite inspections, termite treatments. Maybe you offer multiple different types of termite treatments that they could read about on your website as well. As you get more detailed, you can continue on, maybe talk about bees, maybe talking about spiders, maybe talking about rodent exclusion. The list goes on. And then finally, obviously you could talk about a pest library too, which I know is pretty popular in the pest control world, having a pest library. My personal belief on the pest library is it's one of those extra things but it's not necessarily one of those things that I would say is hypercritical because most people are searching when they have a problem. And you can lead a lot leave a lot of that information and stuff for your blog. So that blog is where we can add a lot of the content and related items to your local market, such as scorpions in Arizona.

22:54 Dan Leibrandt

Yeah, awesome. Yeah, no, I've definitely seen some overlap with that myself of the Pest Library and the blog. It's like, you if we're already talking about spiders in Arizona, I mean, is that a pest page or is that a blog page? We can kind of do both. So I'm in complete agreement with you there. Yeah, then talk to me more about the blogs. What should we be blogging about? Should it only be top of funnel stuff or what should the content be there?

23:16 Aaron Shishilla

Yeah, great question. The thing kind of when you talk about from an SEO world, when we're targeting particular content or running particular content, we're looking for two things. We're looking for good volume. So we know that people are searching for it. And two, it's not super difficult. So if you're searching for something online and let's say familyhandyman.com is ranking for it, which is a very well known site. Right. You're probably going to have a difficult time ranking next to familyhandyman.com. So keep those things in mind and it's better to be hyper local. So if you keep things relevant towards Phoenix or Orlando, Florida or Tampa, Florida, wherever you're located, that's obviously very, very important because those people are looking for, hey, I have a mosquito problem in Tampa. How do I solve that mosquito problem? Well, maybe you can write an article about, hey, here are our top five tips to solve your mosquito problem in Tampa, Florida as a particular blog post.

24:12 Aaron Shishilla

But obviously you can hire an SEO and usually those SEOs can use like content. But if you're doing it on your own, my general tips are thinking hyper local and as well as what are people searching for and what answers can you give them in that particular blog post?

24:27 Dan Leibrandt

Yeah, awesome, love that. And I'll pivot here a little bit. You mentioned this, or at least you're talking about this a little bit of like people will build on Squarespace or Wix. What is your favorite website builder?

24:39 Aaron Shishilla

No, I love WordPress. You love WordPress too?

24:41 Dan Leibrandt

Yeah, me too. Uh huh.

24:44 Aaron Shishilla

Yeah, WordPress is ultimately my particular favorite. It's an open source platform. So it's essentially like Wix or Squarespace or even if what's the other one Shopify, you know, a lot of people get sucked into Shopify. Those are good too. But it's their ecosystem. They control that ecosystem. WordPress is almost like any web designer or SEO in there can do like work on the engine. And so it takes a little bit more expertise. But it has a lot more functionality in terms of what you can do with it compared to any of these others. It's some limited stuff. You know, you're stuck with what you have and you kind of need like in some cases somebody from Squarespace to say like, hey, we're to add this feature so you can actually be able to do this where WordPress anybody can go in and add a plug into something so that way you can make whatever happen and you can obviously edit the code at any given time.

25:34 Dan Leibrandt

Awesome, yeah, we love WordPress as well. I think about 50 % of the internet is built on WordPress. Obviously that gives it some credibility. Most of the home service companies and pest control companies that I'm working with are already using it. So that just makes it more convenient. But yeah, I love it for all the different plugins, all the different variability. But like you said, is a little bit more advanced of like, you know, there's some super simple ones if you've seen something like Card or maybe even Wix or Squarespace. I don't use those too much, but. Yeah, my favorite is definitely WordPress as well. So going off of that, what are some top plugins that you should be using on WordPress, assuming you're using it?

26:10 Aaron Shishilla

Let's see. Besides, so we're not going to be talking about like designer builder plugins, right? So not theme related.

26:17 Dan Leibrandt

Whatever plugins.

26:18 Aaron Shishilla

Whatever plugins. Okay. Some of my favorite...

26:21 Dan Leibrandt

Not themes.

26:22 Aaron Shishilla

What's that?

26:23 Dan Leibrandt

I said not themes. Yeah, any plugins that you would like.

26:29 Aaron Shishilla

Some of my favorite plugins that we use on almost every site. One of them is WPForms, so WordPress forms. By far one of my favorites in order to automatically capture all of your leads that you're going to be receiving if you work with Dan or Aaron, of course. And then after that, the next step one after that is WP SMTP. That is a good extension to WPForms to essentially ensure your leads are getting delivered to your email inbox properly. So that's an extra configuration that might take a little bit more of an advanced step, but it's a good way to ensure that you're getting every single lead delivered to your inbox that comes in through WPForms. There's a couple other ones that I would recommend such as WP Rocket is another great one. WP Rocket is a good optimizer. So a lot of these themes within WordPress need a little bit of cleanup, need a little bit of extra help in order to optimize fully. For mobile responsiveness, for example, or even on desktop and optimize the speed of the website. So WP Rocket is just an easy way to do that. Another one that I probably like a lot is Imagify. So Imagify goes hand in hand with WP Rocket. That optimizes a lot of image files and shows them in this new web format. So not a PNG or a JPEG that people might think of. It puts it in a different format that is actually more condensed and loads a lot faster, especially on browsers like Google Chrome that a lot of people utilize. If I had to go on for that, I'm a big fan of SEO. That's perfect. Perfect, Dan. OK,...

28:04 Dan Leibrandt

What about SEO? Haha...

28:10 Aaron Shishilla

So maybe you have a different opinion on this. So back in the day, I felt like Yoast SEO was like the plug in to use. But I feel like Yoast SEO is slacking a little bit. I've been testing out Rank Math a little bit. So in terms of SEO plugins, I would go with either a Yoast SEO or Rank Math. I think there's more functionality to Rank Math. But I think Yoast SEO is good to just kind of set it and forget it and kind of get some nice red or green lights. Because Yoast SEO in terms of its functionality, you say who you are, you say what a page is optimized for, and it gives you a red or green light based on how well you optimized it.

28:45 Dan Leibrandt

Huh. Okay, interesting. I heard you mentioned Yoast on another podcast. Yeah, I personally like Rank Math more. It is a little bit more expensive and it's a little bit more, I guess maybe you have to be more of an expert. Yoast, like you said, you can kind of set it and forget it. So yeah, I definitely like Rank Math more. So, okay, cool. So that's plugins. Now what about tracking? I know you're huge on tracking. What do we need to be doing in order to track the success of our website? Do we need Google Analytics, Search Console, Semrush? What are all the components we need to track the website?

29:21 Aaron Shishilla

Yeah, it's ultimately gonna be like whatever obviously is gonna be most easy for you. I know a lot of companies use Google Analytics. Know, Google Analytics to me is like good for like just base tracking. Same thing with Google Search Console. Good for just the basics. I definitely recommend setting up both regardless. It's obviously very important to set up Google Search Console from an SEO perspective. But in terms of tracking, I would definitely set up a Google Analytics just to understand the general metrics of people landing on your site, how you're trending. Your bounce rate if people are leaving very quickly on your site. And I would set up Google Search Console just as a matter of necessity in order to make sure Google is indexing your site properly. Outside of that, in terms of other systems that I like, I do like systems like WhatConverts or CallRail. Those are really two great systems in order to automatically, dynamically put different call tracking numbers on your website and track all your forms. The reason for those two specifically is so that way if somebody comes from Facebook if somebody comes from Instagram if somebody comes from Google if somebody comes from Bing or a random email You can actually attribute that given lead to where that source was So for WolfPack if we're running all different types of advertising for a bunch of different clients Or we're doing social media for some a bunch of clients We can aggregate all the lead data and then understand exactly what the return on investment is through a particular channel So if we ran Google ads, we know hey you made a 5x ROI on your Google ad campaign in the last three months.

30:49 Dan Leibrandt

Hmm, love that. Yeah, we're obviously big proponents of tracking as well. I think it's just a non-negotiable, especially as you get into more platforms, if you're doing website SEO and then Google Business Profile and then Yelp and then social media and then Facebook ads. Like, know, by the time we're doing all these different platforms and we're getting all these different leads, how do we know which one is working? So I'm totally with you there. We have to make sure that we're tracking all the different platforms. We have to know. Hey, you know, if we're spending, you know, 5K a month on Facebook ads and they're, you're barely making any money, but we're spending a ton with local service ads and they're crushing it, then crank it up on local service ads and do less on Facebook ads. So a hundred percent agree there. Something else I wanted to cover, which maybe we even spend the bulk of the rest of the show on is what is the future of websites and search and SEO? Where do you see things going?

31:43 Aaron Shishilla

You know, I was just talking about this. Think yesterday I was on another podcast and I was just talking about this. So it's a little bit older news right now, just because we're now we're talking about at the end of May. But Dan, I don't know if you knew and there was a story posted. So I keep up on all the news with Perplexity, Perplexity, the application. And there was a story on Perplexity about how Apple for the first time ever reported that Google searches through Safari declined.

32:12 Dan Leibrandt

Yeah, I saw that.

32:13 Aaron Shishilla

That's a massive thing to say. And I think it was really underrated and undersold as a story because somebody from Apple is specifically stating for the first time ever, Google searches went down and Google obviously is not going to report to us all the time what their Google search history is. And I guarantee you, I guarantee you more people are going to Google. And if you look at any particular SEO tracking software, they're a hundred percent leaning into, hey, you can track your positions on Google now, but you could track how you're ranking on ChatGPT or how you're ranking on Perplexity or how you're ranking on Grok. And I know for my personal self, I'm not Googling informational stuff anymore. I have ChatGPT right at the dock of my phone right at the bottom. And I'm talking to ChatGPT all day long like it's my personal therapist, which is probably concerning from a data standpoint because it knows everything about me. But I'll tell you, my mental health, Dan, has never been better since I've it's been my personal assistant.

33:13 Dan Leibrandt

Really? Yeah, no, I agree with you on that.

33:13 Aaron Shishilla

I'm able to talk about everything. Yeah, I'm going a little bit off topic, but my personal health has never been better. So in terms of the future, websites are always going to be important, regardless. I don't care what anyone particularly says, especially with these AI models, because they're still scraping all of the data from your website. And even another study that was published talked about how for every six visits or every I'm sorry, every visit that they give your website, Google will crawl six pages on average. Comparatively, ChatGPT or even what's the other Dan help me out here. This other A.I. One Claude Claude A.I. For every visit that they give you on average, they are indexing thousands of pages. So your website, regardless, is always going to be important in the. Content that you put on your website is always going to be important because that's what this AI uses in order to continue training its models. And things are going to change with pest control, with home inspections, with digital marketing, and AI needs that information to understand what's changing. So don't think, hey, just because of this AI world, I'm going to stop my content, I'm going to stop my SEO, I'm going to stop my web design, because it's not going to matter anymore. It's still going to matter. It's just how the clients are going to find you or get to that has changed a little bit. There's a wonderful graphic that I saw on Twitter that basically showed, hey, if you now Google anything that is like general informative stuff, like how do I get rid of ants? Right. I had a blog post that was ranking number one for for a year on how to get rid of ants. And that particular blog post had an AI overview section now. So that blog post I had got pushed down. And in the AI overview section, they just have all these footnotes and sources to go to that website where we wrote the article for. I would imagine at some point in terms of advertising too, like Google will find a way to put advertisements in these AI responses as well. But what's really concerning to me is just, I really do believe, Dan, I don't know where you stand on this. I think this is the largest shakeup ever for Google and Google search. And for digital marketing, it's more important than ever to make sure if you're spending a lot of money on digital marketing, or you're interested in getting into it.

35:29 Aaron Shishilla

To work with somebody that is staying top of mind with what's going on with the changes in digital marketing. They have to be start thinking about how traffic is being brought into you with ChatGPT and even tracking that. So using a system like CallRail or WhatConverts, it can track the leads that you're getting from ChatGPT. I think there was one month with WolfPack, we received three leads from ChatGPT that we tracked, which was really quite interesting. Was like, I wonder how that happened, but quite interesting.

35:57 Dan Leibrandt

Awesome. Yeah, no, I 100 % agree with everything you just said. One of the main points there is that websites still will matter. I was gonna mention that, I'm glad you mentioned this, these large language models like ChatGPT are pulling from the web. So it's not like just all websites disappear and like the web just ceases to exist. No, they're just pulling from the web. So it's still maybe now more important than ever to have a website. But you talked about the... So you said that the website's still important, but it's changing and like, you know, ranking and showing up, everything is changing. How do we adapt to that then? Like what should we be doing now? And in the future is there, should we be differing the content that we make? Should we be structuring the site another way? What are your thoughts on this?

36:44 Aaron Shishilla

Yeah, it's a great point, very valid point. And I don't think anybody right now has all the answers. I think a lot of people in the SEO world are kind of, and even the web design world are kind of all scratching their heads or coming up with theories on how they should be going about their lives and their daily work. And I'll say right now, what's really, really important is just making sure you're setting up some type of tracking to see how it's changing in the results. So make sure you have Google Analytics set up. And then you can use, you mentioned it earlier, you can use a Semrush or another tool to essentially track all the business you're getting from these AI models. Such as I mentioned earlier, WolfPack was able to get three leads from ChatGPT. Outside of that, I would keep the majority of its status quo with everything that you do. Keep it focused on the end consumer and the person at the end of the day. So a lot of the early SEO optimization stuff was really geared towards the algorithm, but a lot of shift has happened to where it's all focused on the consumer. Would continue focusing on the consumer rather than trying to play into some particular algorithm because that's ultimately what everybody is trying to go to anyway. Google results, ChatGPT, Claude AI, Perplexity. They're all trying best to serve the consumer as quickly as possible. So your website and your content needs to pull the same way. And then how you're tracking that needs to change.

38:06 Dan Leibrandt

Definitely. Yeah, no, it's super interesting. Like you said, I like that you've taken a humble approach to this, that everyone, or least a good amount of people like to think that they know exactly what's gonna happen, but we really don't. This has like completely changed the space. Like, are there gonna be little Google ad snippets in the AI overviews? Are there gonna be more AI overviews? Are they gonna remove them? Is Google Business Profile still gonna be relevant? Is that gonna look different? So I agree. Mean, we can't necessarily say... That there's one thing to do or do this on your website. I'm more for like what I've been advocating more recently is more bottom of funnel content and brand stuff. But overall there's still, there's not like one prescription here, which is pretty tough. But like you said a little bit earlier that you need to have someone who's digital marketing savvy on your team, on your side, whether that's like a consultant, whether that's even your like your son or daughter or maybe an agency like ours that you just have someone that's on your team that is very adaptable, that is staying up to date with what's going on because things are changing so fast that maybe websites won't be so important at some point, or maybe, you know, it's all social media now. You know, everything that's changing so quick, I think you need someone on your team that knows what's going on.

39:25 Aaron Shishilla

Absolutely. Know, at the end of the day, a lot of people might be panicking or stressing out about something, but all these algorithms and what they're trying to do is just serve the consumer. Just reiterating kind of what I was saying earlier is if you go in with that particular mindset and play into that, you're going to be doing fine no matter what. A good example of this is thinking about Google Local Service Ads. With Google Local Service Ads, what does the consumer see and what do they care about? Well, they care about the reputation and the reviews that show up. Right and that you're verified for the job. Care about the photos that they see. So you need good reviews. You need good photos. You need a good reputation and then ultimately they care about the relationship that they build with you over the phone and what the end price is and see if that's value for them. The same thing applies across the fold for everything else and if you're super stressed out or even stressed about cash right now as Dan you mentioned earlier focusing on the bottom of the funnel stuff. It will be an easy way to know that you're getting the return on investment rather than the top of the funnel. But if you have extra money to spend top of funnel is still very important to increase your reach, increase your impressions because there's studies obviously that show if you see something seven times or whatever, you're more likely to buy than somebody that obviously is showing just for the first time. And it goes for like any particular business no matter who you are.

40:43 Dan Leibrandt

Awesome. And maybe to close us out, I have one question after this, but for those bottom of funnel pages that we're talking about, if maybe that might be like a Pest Control Chicago page, or even it's more general, but still it ranks on some of those bottom of funnel keywords that might be called like money keywords to money pages that are going to generate you revenue, assuming someone clicks on it and converts on that page. How can we optimize those pages for conversions? What should be on those?

41:10 Aaron Shishilla

Yeah, so if repeat your question again specifically, are we talking about the service pages?

41:15 Dan Leibrandt

The bottom of funnel pages, might be like a pest control Chicago page.

41:20 Aaron Shishilla

Okay, so and we're optimizing for SEO, correct?

41:24 Dan Leibrandt

We're optimizing, I'm talking about conversions. So someone is already on the page. How do we make sure that they convert and become a customer?

41:31 Aaron Shishilla

Yeah, so going back to what I was saying earlier with the home page, a lot of the same rules apply here. But even if we're talking about, let's just say for advertising to the same kind of information apply. So top right, we need that clear call to action button. That's going to be the same color. Very contrasting. So if we have a white background, think red, green, blue button and all those call to action colors going to match throughout each section. You can imagine like just the first section that hero section is going to be one block. With each block, we're going to aim to have a call to action on that. And we're going to have a main headline subheading. Those trust badges are super important and whatever call to action that you want right below that. For advertising and for some service pages, you may also want a form on that page. I know there's a lot of web designs out there that have a form on every single page. It's kind of a preference thing. If you want a form on every single page, it's a good way for people to just automatically enter their information rather than. Giving them extra work to do to click a page and then submit their information. It's kind of up to you because I feel in some aspects that it can clutter the website versus they can enjoy the aesthetic a little bit more but have to put in a little bit more work. So the goal here is to lessen the workload for the consumer so they can just easily see what's the trade off and here's my information. As you scroll down on that page, all the same stuff applies applying a bunch of information, frequently asked questions at the bottom. Finally, we cannot forget our final bottom call to action. Same color, nice contrasting colors on the background compared to the call to action button. Sometimes when we build these landing pages too, when we're advertising for just a particular service, we'll take out the header and the footer and we'll build our own header and footers and remove all links to essentially make it. We don't want you to click anywhere else but the call to action or but submitting the lead form. But in terms of a regular page on your website, that's not something you want to do because you want to make sure that everybody can find the information that they want.

43:27 Dan Leibrandt

Interesting. Okay. Okay. So yeah, essentially all the same rules apply from your homepage. And I generally agree with that because overall you want to optimize all of these pages for conversion. So love that. Last thing I want to ask you before you, wrap up is in general, overall, what advice would you like to give to pest control owners? Maybe there's something really big that they're lacking. Maybe, this is just something that you're super passionate about. What advice would you give to the just general pest control owner listening to the show?

43:57 Aaron Shishilla

Yeah, I would say the most that I see out of a lot of pest control company and business owners is a lot of times you get sucked into the day to day and you might forget about your SEO strategy, your website, your advertising or whatever it is, but you need to set the time daily to or not daily every week or so to look at those metrics and understand them and communicate to whoever is doing your marketing. I don't care if it's you. I don't care if it's like you mentioned, like a son or a daughter. I don't care if it's an agency like or it's Dan or it's a consultant, whoever need to set the time to do that. Because quite frankly, what happens, I think all too often is they're working with marketing with they hire somebody and their expectations maybe at the beginning are unrealistic or they have good initial goals that they meet and they say, great. But then it goes by the wayside and they stop tracking things. And then three months later, they're like, this is this is really bad. And then they quit on it and they quit on the goal. We can't quit on the goal. That's where we need to go foot on the gas and say, what are the metrics telling us? Because the metrics don't lie. They tell you exactly what is wrong. For example, if we're running any particular kind of campaign, we might say, OK, how many clicks are we getting? What's the impressions? Is the click through rate good? Is it not? Is the conversion rate good or is it not? And each step we know what is either broken or still working. And a lot of times what happens is with any particular thing you might notice, hey, we're actually getting all these calls and they're actually good leads. But I have an issue with my office that I wasn't even paying attention to or my call center that I wasn't even paying attention to. Or hey, I found out like this has happened so many times. I don't know about you, Dan, but we find out that all the leads that are being sent to this particular company are actually just going to this person's this person's phone. And it's being directed to spam. Because AT&T and T-Mobile, there's so much...

45:49 Dan Leibrandt

Mm-hmm. Haha, yeah.

45:51 Aaron Shishilla

Spam nowadays and so it's actually they have hidden stuff on the back end and they're actually missing a ton of calls So they're upset and they come to us and they say, you know, I'm not getting any leads You know, you guys are reporting these leads, but I'm not getting anything Check your phones, but I go without saying going back to the beginning Make sure you're tracking these analytics and either meet meeting or speaking with somebody at least once a month If you can look at it on your own every single week and you're staying on top of it because these trends change and your strategy and everything has to change with it. Three months from now, if you look back into it, of course, it's not going to be doing well because you should have been changing for the last three months and shifting the strategy a little bit, whether it's shifting budget, changing your focus or whatever else it is.

46:34 Dan Leibrandt

Amen. I think this has been a great podcast. Well, I think we'll wrap it up here. So Aaron, where can people learn more about you and the services that you provide?

46:43 Aaron Shishilla

Yeah, people could obviously go to wolfpackadvising.com for all the information, but honestly, just add me on social media. I love connecting with people on social media. A lot of people have been sending me messages lately. Happy to help, so shoot me a message and we'll stay in touch there. Can check out all my links on social media.

46:58 Dan Leibrandt

What social platforms and I'll link all those below...

47:01 Aaron Shishilla

It's everything, man. It's everything. If you want to see the funny dance moves, well, bad dance moves, it's TikTok. If you want to see the professional side of me, it's Facebook. I don't ever go on LinkedIn,...

47:12 Dan Leibrandt

Dang, dude, you gotta get on LinkedIn. That's where I'm at.

47:15 Aaron Shishilla

No, no, I hate LinkedIn. It's just there's so many people trying to sell me something. And like, to be quite frank, I like going on social media and I like I like I like TikTok. You know, you could just dance and kind of have fun and just have natural conversation. I don't know about you, but LinkedIn has maybe we chat a little bit more about that. But for LinkedIn, for me, it's always just been tons of spam, tons of sales. And I don't get real connection out of that. I don't know.

47:19 Dan Leibrandt

Mmm.

47:41 Dan Leibrandt

It's totally spammy and artificial, but you know, I still like it. I still like playing the LinkedIn game. It's fun, but that's an interesting take. Okay, so everyone go follow him on Facebook and I'll link the rest of those below. So yeah, it's been great having you on the show here in the Spin of Blast. It's been great meeting you and I hope to do it again.

47:58 Aaron Shishilla

Thank you, Dan.

47:58 Dan Leibrandt

Yeah, yeah, for sure.