In this episode, Louis returns to discuss developments in SEO and local lead generation for Managed Service Providers (MSPs). Louis highlights the importance of MSPs taking advantage of local SEO, especially using Google Maps profiles, to attract leads. He emphasises the need for MSPs to build an attractive and trustworthy Google Business profile with plenty of positive reviews. Louis also introduces a new self-implementation product designed to help MSPs take control of their marketing efforts and save costs, stressing the significance of a collaborative approach between owners and marketers. Daniel and Adam reiterate the importance of prioritising sales and marketing for business growth.
00:00 Welcome Back, Louis!
00:23 Current Trends in MSP Lead Generation
01:46 The Power of Local SEO
03:28 Niche Marketing Strategies for MSPs
06:46 Optimizing Your Google Business Profile
14:34 The Importance of Reviews
20:51 Introducing a New Lead Generation Product
27:16 Final Thoughts and Wrap-Up
Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts
Connect with Louis Veldhuijzen on LinkedIn by clicking here – https://www.linkedin.com/in/lodewijk-veldhuijzen/
Connect with Daniel Welling on LinkedIn by clicking here – https://www.linkedin.com/in/daniel-welling-54659715/
Connect with Adam Morris on LinkedIn by clicking here – linkedin.com/in/adamcmorris
Visit The MSP Finance Team website, simply click here – https://www.mspfinanceteam.com/
We look forward to catching up with you on the next one. Stay tuned!
Transcript:
Daniel: Louis, great to have you back on the podcast.
Louis: Yes, thank you so much for having me. I’m excited to be back. Good to see you again, Daniel Adam.
Daniel: So yes, we were just talking actually about the, the last episode you were on was episode 13 and we’re in the, late 80s,heading into the 90s as we record this, first time, you very kindly shared. an overview of, pay per click, advertising and an SEO,SEO, we particularly want to talk about, today as, there’s been some developments in that over the last, couple of years, but, perhaps first of all, it’d be great to, just hear a little bit about what you’re seeing out there in the MSP lead generation, marketplace, to sort of set the scene for us
Louis: Okay, I’m going to heavily generalize here, of course, as one would in this scenario, right? But, and I don’t mean to bash the industry in general, but there is a lot of room for improvement in MSP lead generation. And, it’s kind of weird to me because MSPs are some of the most talented, intelligent people on the planet.
Louis: but then they think they’re too busy for marketing, right? And, but business is about growing your business. You want to inspire your team, your people, your family, et cetera. And, they kind of like push that activity to weigh, which I think is a shame because there are many. Critical decisions you have to make as an operator to make sure that your business is going to grow.
Louis: And some of these things are really easy to set up. And that’s also one of the things that I want to be talking about with you guys today is just some of the things that MSPs can do within local SEO and within SEO. To just get their lead generation going because there’s so many MSPs that get zero, which is a scary number to me, leads a year, right?
Louis: Just referrals. And it’s, and it’s crazy. But for me, what I’m seeing now in terms of trends is that local SEO is the big winner across the board when it comes to lead generation for MSPs.
Adam: So just when we’re going all global and COVID meant that we all work remotely and we can, you know, now service the country rather than our local area, you’re saying, no, no, no, no, let’s just go back to local geography.
Louis: it’s funny that you mentioned that because yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying. The thing is that when it comes to search engines, the old school SEO with the links that no one uses anymore has been just so over optimized to death that getting in there is just no longer cost effective.
Louis: Whereas there are other optimization techniques, which are much more in line with how people shop, which is, you know, if you go to a restaurant, you open Google maps. If you want to get a mechanic, you open Google maps. If you want to get. Your clothing tailored open Google Maps. Guess what? If you want an MSP, what do you do?
Louis: You also open Google Maps, right? And these are some of these things if you explain them to people’s like, oh, yeah, that makes sense like I shop this way and everyone shops this way, but People wouldn’t really think of it themselves. And yes This is the first thing that you should be optimizing for because it’s quick.
Louis: It’s easy and it’ll get you leads.
Adam: you should do
Louis: Yes, I think so. Yeah, because if you think about it, the restaurants in your local market, they’re full, they’re busy, and it’s all Google Maps, right? These people do not know how to do advanced SEO, right? They’re restaurants. The same for everyone else in your town. They don’t have 5, 000 euro a month marketing agencies.
Louis: It’s just like, Hey, they just got a profile going and it works. but the MSPs just skip this step entirely. And it’s one of the easiest things to do. one of the more difficult things is gathering the reviews, but if you’ve got a good business, then it’s a number one thing you have to do.
Louis: and, my immediate question, obviously, we’ve spoken at length about niching, and, and of course, geographic niches, you know, is valid. but, is it, I guess, I guess I’m answering my own question, but this isn’t contrary to then having. Additional niches over and above locality.
Daniel: Correct.
Louis: If you’re going to niche down as an MSP, I mean, there’s many different ways to do it, of course. But yes, you have your geographical location in which you can create your own niche, right? And then there’s also industries that you could niche yourself down in. And you could also niche yourself down in, for example, company size.
Louis: Right. Because larger companies have completely different issues from smaller companies. That’s clear. And most of the time you’re going to have a combination between the two. Because if you’re going to niche on industry size that you automatically are also kind of making it local. So, whereas if you do one specific industry, then most of the time you would do anything that size because you just become an expert in that one specific industry.
Louis: So what you want to do is you want to just create your perfect little, you know, customer avatar. And you’re like, hey. These persons are the problems I’m going to be fixing and then go for it because there’s so many MSPs out there that you’re not going to stand out unless you really just target one thing.
Louis: And you can also do that locally.
Daniel: and, interestingly, you talked about size there. this is in the way we’re describing our clients and their businesses and their. Problems would that come up in the Google, the local SEO element? Like, could I type in, five people and I want it support, like, what are people searching on?
Louis: it’s a really good question. So people wouldn’t type like, Hey, I have this many end points and this is what I’m looking for clearly, but people would just type, the classics like managed IT services, IT UK for you guys, or at least not as much. Although if they do, then they really know what they want, right?
Louis: So it is worth optimizing for sure, but they won’t mention their end point size, If you still create, that Azure perfect avatar, then those clients will leave specific kinds of reviews on your profile because you’ll be solving their problems. So you might be more inclined to focus on responsiveness or price or whatever the thing is, working with legacy systems, ERPs, right?
Louis: You’re going to be solving particular problems. And then, they will be leaving reviews about that on your profile so that when other companies are looking at your profile, they’ll be like, Hey, these are the guys, solving the problems that I want to address. And, from there, they may or may not go to your website because these days, websites no longer most important thing when you’re doing local SEO, right?
Louis: I’m sure many times you’ve been going to restaurants or mechanics without even checking out their website, correct? You just read the reviews and like, Hey, this is my guy. So website is becoming less and less important unless you’re running Google ads, which is also interesting. That’s brand new.
Louis: but basically by just. down on a specific size, you will automatically attract more of that size. And while you may say, Hey, I’m kind of like focusing on this subset particularly. And that does mean that you’re pushing some people away in absolute amounts. Your number of leads still increases because they feel so much more spoken to.
Louis: That’s even in absolutes, you go up, not just relative.
Adam: and, how, what is the, approach then for a multi site service, multiple offices or multiple geographic, coverage, either or even internationally.
Louis: yeah. So thank you. It’s a really good question. So the both fortunate and unfortunate answer is that you just have to crank it out. So loads of major providers, their whole business model is just these little local SEO profiles because it’s the cheapest, most cost effective way. The easiest way to generate leads.
Louis: So for example, if you take a look at the US, which I know is not your market, but you have companies like a team logic and CMIT. And they are franchises and they have thousands and thousands of these little local SEO profiles and they’re absolutely killing it, right? So what you would do is you would just create different or multiple local SEO profiles across different markets.
Louis: And to be honest, if you’re targeting a different subset in a different city, that’s totally fine. You could do that. You would just take your local SEO profile and then point it to a different landing page. For that market. and you’re good. The reviews you can also just,
Adam: So I can set up geo, local geo search without any physical or virtual office.
Louis: no, that’s not correct. Unfortunately. I wish so you, the whole center of local SEO is a Google business profile. That’s what it all starts with. That’s the thing you find a Google maps, but Google, I think about six to nine months ago, they got really tight with virtual offices. And you really need a physical address right now, unless you’re literally just cheating Google, that what’s, that’s kind of sad, to be honest, because I think 80 percent of the MSP space has still has virtual offices and they’ve just meant benefited massively from the fact that we’re still allowed, but everyone that’s coming in now, gets filtered heavily.
Adam: Well, in some ways that’s positive, isn’t it? Because it stops others invading your geography, which is one of your USPs effectively, if that’s what you’re targeting. So, it’s a fairer approach, you could argue.
Louis: I’m not sure if I entirely agree with that. I just think it then costs more capital for an MSP to attract lead flow. maybe because I am a marketing agency or represent a marketing agency, I think more, for the new guy that’s trying to get this going, you know, a lot of people approaching me with the struggle.
Louis: And then I, of course, want to help people with the struggle, right? But that then may or may not require, additional investments. So also because it comes from your Google business profile. You’re heavily dependent on your geographical position of your actual office, right? So if you’re in the city center, you’re going to be competing with all the other MSPs in the city center Sometimes it’s better to be outskirts Because if you want to compare it to something, if there’s only one mechanic in the area, he fixes all the cars, right?
Louis: And the same is true for MSPs. So there’s, you’re you lose flexibility. But yes, it is true that in a way it does even out the playing field for future work. Because now there are still people benefiting from the legacy model. That’s correct.
Daniel: just so I’m clear on this, then, if I have an office in Marlow, marvellous Marlow, I can create a local Google business profile, for, well managed it in Marlow and, but I can’t do that if I happen to have an office, a virtual office, Or I’m based in a coworking space, what do I have to do to validate that I’m a real business in that location?
Louis: Hi Daniel. Thank you. Such a good question. So these days, and it keeps changing, but these days you need to make a video of yourself with your smartphone where you walk around your office. from the outside towards the inside, and then you also need to open at least one closet. and that pretty much sums it up.
Louis: So you can sometimes game it if you, for example, are in a co working space where you just have an office in a co working space. Right? But just a virtual box or a post box is not going to cut it anymore.
Daniel: Okay. So I’m based in Marlow, but I also cover High Wycombe and Henley and the outskirts of London. how do I create that local Google profile for those areas?
Louis: So one, you can of course just invest in another space there and then drop another pin, right? That’s an option. That’s free. What you can also do is run Google ads on the map pack itself. Then what would happen is that your profile gets boosted to the top. That is absolutely useless unless for example, you have a really attractive profile with the most reviews, et cetera, right?
Louis: Advertising is just becoming visible. They still have to pick you and most MSPs, that’s like, Oh, advertising, if I am visible, people will buy my stuff. It’s like, no, you just become one of the 20 options on the market. And most of the times you’re not winning. So if your profile is so good that you can beat all the other profiles, then you can consider that.
Louis: But you will be advertising in another town, which is a little bit further away. And people will take that variable into account when they’re looking at your profile. Right, they’re doing, if people, if you’re gonna work with someone, it’s always a calculation. How good are they and how far away are they, right?
Louis: Whether it’s mechanic or dinner or whatever, like dinner has to be exceptional if you want to drive 20 minutes. But it’s like five minutes away. It’s like, ah, you know, no problem. I’ll have the whatever food this time. So yeah, if it’s a little bit further away, you need to have a really good profile.
Adam: can you just then talk about what this profile is and you talk about good profiling, talk about profile beating and other profiles, but just expand on that, can you?
Louis: Thank you, so I, if I expand on this, I want to actually just teach a way of looking at this because the teaching is easier to remember than the technicals themselves. So when you want to improve anything about your business. I know this sounds basic, but please humour me. Pretend that you’re a prospect.
Louis: Right? It’s so often that people just skip this step. So, for example, let’s say that you’re going out to dinner. What do you want to do? You want to see the restaurant and you want to see the food. Why? Otherwise it’s too high risk. You’re never going to go, regardless of how high the ratings are. Right? If you’re going to go to a mechanic, you want to know where you’re going to be dropping your car.
Louis: Right? Is a good garage, what the mechanics look like, etc. Otherwise, too high risk, there’s so many garages around, you’re just gonna pick another one. If you’re going to establish a long term B2B relationship with a company, do you think you might want to see which people are working there? Probably, right?
Louis: Otherwise too high risk, just pick another MSP. So you need to think about, Hey, what would I as a prospect want to see before I engage with a company like this, or at least send an inquiry. So that means just really likable, good photos of the team, preferably in uniform. That’s also shows competence, right?
Louis: And trust no aggression. Aggression is bad. Some people think they need to look very serious and like, Oh no, cybersecurity. Yeah. Don’t do that. If you would just show off with certifications instead and make sure that you optimize your profile to hit a lot of keywords, you can do that by influencing your services list.
Louis: That’s a big opportunity as well, because every. Let’s say month or something new services get developed, for example, AI agents, right? That’s going to be so hot in 2025. Put it in your service list in your Google business profile, because I promise you no other MSP has done that. So then if people search AI agent inside Google Maps, guess who shows up?
Louis: You and no one else, right? And these are these little things that you could just keep it to account. Sure.
Adam: Okay. the, the other area, I was just going to circle back on was the review component of this. And. just talk to us a little bit about where do these feature, what, what kind of, how do they fit overall within the, you know, how successful this, this campaign is and, and what are some of the tips about getting some of these reviews so that it’s easier to get them
Louis: Okay, so first I’ll talk about how important they are, right? And again, from a prospect perspective, because you need to learn how to look at that yourself. So basically when you’re going, let’s say a mechanic, if you want to find a mechanic, let’s say you see two profiles on top that have 40 reviews and then the third profile has 10.
Louis: You’re not even going to open it. Right. You’re just skipping past it. Right. And so what you want to do is you want to just open Google Maps, be in your local market, type IT support near me, and then just be like, hey, which profiles would I even open and which ones would I skip? If you would skip yourself That’s the reason you’re getting zero leads is because everyone’s skipping you, right?
Louis: So you can sometimes get away with not having the most reviews as long as you’re still one of the guys that they would open. So the first filter is like reviews and distance, a number of reviews and average rating because then they start reading them and that’s the next thing, right? But the number of reviews you don’t have enough, sorry, no leads, right?
Louis: It’s the same for restaurants, same for hairdresser, MSPs are no different. So, and the tips to get them. I mean, the main tip that I should give, and every MSP that doesn’t have this deserves a smack over the head, but your ticketing system needs to be updated with the Smiley system. Right? Like Happy Smiley, Sad Smiley, and the Happy Smiley.
Louis: Just point it to your Google Business profile and collect them. You’ll get a few reviews each month like this. If you want to buy a cheap software to do this, because most MSPs use Smileback, it’s crazy expensive. Don’t use that. You can go to a website called AppSumo. com this is like crack for me personally, and probably also for you.
Louis: AppSumo basically sells software that startups produce. So, but rather than paying a monthly subscription, you pay once for a lifetime access, which is amazing.
Adam: and how do you spell it?
Louis: yep, AppSumo, A P, Sumo, S U M O, dot com. And I spend way too much money there, it’s horrible, but I love it, what can I say. So you go there and you type something like Google reviews and then you’ll find something with a smiley face and you dump that inside your ticketing system.
Louis: That’s a basic, right? Then also, just be realistic about the fact that you want to grow your business. And sometimes that means pulling in favours and swallowing your pride a bit. So you’re gonna go to former colleagues, you’re gonna go to family. And you’re not going to tell them to lie, but you’re just going to ask them to share about you like, hi, I’ve known Daniel or Adam for years and they’re fantastic.
Louis: And they like, whenever I have something, they come in and they fix it in such a way that I never have a problem again. And that way, just do what’s necessary to get to the amount of reviews. I, we have a client that sent an email blast and they got like 80 reviews in a month, which was awesome. Right. and we were concerned that was too much, too fast.
Louis: but they’ve been like sold out ever since, right? Because people just, they see the number and now suddenly you become a consideration, you don’t get skipped over anymore. So, more than saying like, hey, what would make it easy? The only thing that’s gonna make it easy is you making the conscious decision to just go do it, because otherwise you’re gonna stay stuck.
Louis: And if you just, like, commit, like, okay, whatever, I’m just gonna do whatever it takes, and I’m gonna prioritize this, that’s the thing that makes it easy, and you’ll get it done really quickly.
Daniel: really interesting and wise words, for all areas of the business, not just, lead generation, just one thing that you mentioned there, which, my, limited understanding of SEO and of Google is that it is a constantly moving target.
Daniel: So for example, Google observe. well managed, it suddenly has got 80 reviews in a month. Therefore that’s now suspicious. And now if someone else does that, we’re not going to rate it in the same way. Is that my understanding that correctly?
Louis: No, not necessarily. I was speaking more from a prospect’s perspective. Imagine that you, take a look at a profile, and you see that it got 80 reviews in a month. You’re like, hmmmm. Right. I’m not, this could be fishy. And that is the thing that I was concerned about, but, no problems. Yeah.
Daniel: Okay. So overthinking it, giving Google too much credit there and not enough credit to the
Adam: Is
Louis: Well, I,
Adam: for MSPs? What’s kind of the minimum number of reviews they should aim for?
Louis: So, the correct answer is do the competitive analysis. Right? Because every market is different. In London, for example, you have Air IT. That’s about 240, 250 right now. Which is a lot and can’t be beat. One of the guys that I work with, I have worked with for years, they have way less.
Louis: But their MSP is half a dozen guys and their RIT is massive. So even though they only have 90 reviews because they fish in an entirely different pond and 90 is still enough to get your profile opened and considered, right, they still get good lead flow. And so the correct amount is just dependent on who’s your competition.
Louis: And that is really the thing that’s, it’s the big variable across everything. People forget that For your prospect, it’s all about, just analyzing and finding their best option. And that’s how you should look at marketing rather than absolutes. Most of the time I’d say 40 is an amazing number, but check out your local
Adam: And, is there a balance between quantity and quality?
Louis: Yes, just high quality for everything. But, until you have the right number, no one will read it anyway.
Adam: And volume to begin
Louis: just don’t overthink it, just get the reviews. And even if it’s a potato level review, it’s still a big plus, right? Because you need people to open your profile and then maybe what you can do is, focus on really high quality ones after that.
Daniel: Brilliant. so, well, I guess, a lot of this, information you’re sharing with us and our audience today, but, this and a lot more, is contained within a, a new, offer product service that you have, perhaps you could tell us just a little bit about that
Louis: Oh, yes. Thank you, Daniel. So. I am wondering how to hook into this, but basically looking at the MSP market, I feel like everyone’s getting screwed, right? Because if you’re going to pay between 2 to 3 to 4, 000 a month for a marketing package, it’s a lot of money to the MSP. But most of the time you still get potato level service.
Louis: It’s bad, right? You become just a number. They start off strong and then four or five, six months later, they got another client that’s larger, that’s more exciting, and then poof, everything drops off. And so the only solution to that is either really going with an established agency that you pay over five figures a month to, right?
Louis: That’s an option. But to be honest, as a lot of you have heard here today, many of these things are easy. And many of these things, they require critical thinking from the business owner, the decision maker and executive. That’s also, by the way, why it feels with so many MSP marketing agencies or marketing agencies in general.
Louis: It’s because marketing is actually a dialogue between the owner and the marketer. And this is the step that everyone wants to skip in order to just make streamline everything. And also, if you want to have good success in marketing, you need to keep the business owner accountable and tell them your offer is not good enough.
Louis: This is not good enough. That’s not good enough. No one likes that because no one likes upsetting their customer. Right? So our new product is just a, it’s basically a workbook on how to build your own lead generation funnel with examples on everything that forces you through the correct flow to just create the ultimate.
Louis: Lead generation system for yourself and the reason that the reviews on it are amazing, by the way, just check out our Google business profile and you see them is because you get forced to compare yourself to your competitors and just build something that beats them. And guess what? When you do that, people will prefer your offer over the competitors, right?
Louis: So it’s just a lead generation system in a box that you install and that’s it.
Adam: and just another thought, I used to understand it at least, unless it’s changed that from a general SEO perspective, if you were in a more urban area versus a rural area, you had an advantage in the, ROI on that campaign.is that the same with this or not? Because it’s now geography based.
Louis: Yeah, so, actually very much so right when you’re going to be doing things like local SEO, it depends on how many businesses are in your markets because you know, people are married to their MSPs and they will stay with MSP for eight or 10 years, even if they’re dissatisfied. So you need to be in an area where there’s enough business going around.
Louis: And if you do that, then you’ve got lots of leads, especially if you’re industry agnostic. But if you live somewhere in the outback, your Google business profile is not going to attract anyone there. So the solution then is to rent a space in a city where you can generate leads or try another lead generation method.
Adam: Good. Okay. Really valuable insight.
Daniel: and in terms of, the product, you know, this enables, the MSP to control their own cost base. Effectively they have a strategy and then they’re paying for work at a wholesale level, rather than with an agency management and margin on top.
Daniel: am I understanding that correctly? Yeah.
Louis: So it’s a good question. So basically what you should think is just like, Hey, this is a course slash implementation module that teaches you how to do it yourself. Or an engineer, right? So the executive makes some decisions and then anyone in your business can go through the rest of the program to maybe update your website, maybe update your local SEO, maybe start running Google ads, right?
Louis: There’s, advertising is really hard to figure out how to do. But once you know how to do it, it’s surprisingly simple to just turn the buttons in the SAS, right? So the discovering journey, what are the keyword lists? You know, what are the negative keywords? That costs a million dollars to test. But if you just have, here’s the list, then you can just use it.
Louis: So in our do it yourself program, you just get all those lists that we’ve built over five years. And you just copy paste this stuff. And then you will save immediately one or two hundred grand on your Google Ads campaigns. Right. So basically it’s just a way to upscale your internal team or yourself, and you’ll have, you’ll be able to manifest your destiny and take control yourself of your marketing.
Louis: and I don’t think to be honest, it should be any other way because MSPs love working with SAS. They love critical thinking and the junior marketer that’s gonna take care of you in some no name marketing agency. It’s going to put about 5 percent of the focus on it that you are. Plus they don’t have to step by step.
Louis: So they’re going to do worse de facto. So it’s, yeah.
Daniel: Yeah, really interesting concept. And, certainly see the appeal, and, yes, that sounds like a great innovation in the market. So, that’s a nice, you mentioned Google reviews and positive experiences. is there a limitation though on this?
Daniel: so, are you only going to sell this to a certain number of people in Marlowe or a certain number of people in London? otherwise everyone will have the advantage, right?
Louis: Yeah, that’s a good question. And so we do that with our done for you service, right? If you come in a monthly subscription without saying you do the five figures a month thing, then there’s the limitation. But for the do it yourself, it’s basically just whoever comes in gets their own crack at it. You know, it’s like marketing business growth is also a spiritual endeavour.
Louis: I give you the tools. And in the end, it’s up to the local market to figure out who’s going to win. But I will say that everyone who purchases goes through a call with me first. And that does mean that if you’re in one of those markets where you think it’s not effective enough or there’s not enough volume, I will tell you and I will say like this is not going to work unless you do this or unless you do that.
Louis: And I explicitly make you agree because we have a basically a no good money back guarantee. If you install this and it doesn’t work, I get to just give you all your money back. but I would just rather save you the time and me the money. So, I will only basically let you in if you’re actually a good fit for the program.
Daniel: Super. Okay. Yeah. Sounds, again, sounds even better than in that case. so, so yeah, we’re pretty much at a time. so, yeah, any final thoughts, Adam, to wrap us
Adam: this has been a fantastic episode, so much value in today’s episode. You probably want to listen to it and then listen to it again. and it seems to me that, it’s, it’s worthy of 20 minutes of your time to have a conversation with Louis, and then reflect on whether this is appropriate for you.
Adam: but look, you know, 80 percent of your, of your leadership time should be spent on, on sales and marketing. You need to be doing this. there’s a whole number of things you’ve got to do. There’s only so much you can do, work out what your priorities are. but certainly, this needs to be factored in there, somewhere I would argue.
Louis: Amazing. Thank you so much for those kind words, Adam and Daniel, you too. it’s always a pleasure to be here with you guys. And, thank you for letting me speak.
Daniel: we’ll see if you’re happy back for a third time,
Louis: Yeah, of course.
Daniel: in another year or so. Yeah.
Louis: Of course. Let’s do it.
Daniel: Lovely. Thank you very much.
Louis: Thank you guys.