Episode overview
If your phone was ringing every day and then went quiet, it's almost never the economy, and it's almost never that people stopped needing what you do. Most of the time, something broke. The rest of the time, a competitor passed you while you weren't looking.
In this episode of the Marketing Domination Podcast, Sean Garner walks through the two ways calls disappear for local service businesses. A cliff is when calls drop almost overnight, and it's almost always technical. A fade is when calls slowly drift down over months, and it's almost always competition.
Sean covers the three places a cliff almost always comes from (your Google Business Profile, your ads accounts and your website), how to tell whether a competitor has passed you, and a 10-minute check you can run from your phone this week.
The one thing to remember: if your calls fell off a cliff, something broke. If they faded, someone passed you.
Key moments
Your phone went quiet. Why a sudden drop in calls is almost never the economy.
The call I get all the time. An owner who was busy for years cut prices and tried social posts, then found out his Google Business Profile had been suspended and the notices were going to an old inbox. He thought he had a demand problem. He had a broken pipe.
Cliff or fade? The two ways calls disappear, why they need completely different fixes, and why cutting prices before you know the cause just means you make less on the few calls you still get.
Check 1: Your Google Business Profile. What a healthy listing looks like, how small edits can trigger a re-verification that hides you from customers while you can still see yourself, and why a broken website link on your profile can quietly cost you leads.
Check 2: Your ads accounts. When ads stop, calls stop the same day. Red banners, advertiser verification, Local Services Ads licenses and background checks that lapse, declined cards, and why you should always have owner access to your own accounts.
Check 3: Your website. The sneakiest cliff. A site that loads fast, shows the secure lock, has a clickable phone number and a form that actually sends, and what happens when the security certificate lapses or a form stops syncing.
The fade: your competition. Ranking is a race and it's relative. How to check who passed you, why checking from your own office gives you a false read, and why seasonal businesses should compare year over year.
Your 10-minute check. Five things to check from your phone this week to find out whether you have a cliff or a fade.
Wrap up. Cliff means something broke. Fade means someone passed you. Next episode: why the business with the most reviews isn't always number one on Google Maps.
Resources mentioned
Keep your Google Business Profile healthy and ranking: Local SEO
Local Services Ads management: Google LSA
Keep reviews coming in every week: Reputation management
Not sure if your website is working? Get a free website audit
Who should own your marketing accounts: The #1 marketing agency red flag
More episodes: Marketing Domination Podcast
Can't figure out why your phone went quiet?
If you ran the 10-minute check and found something broken, or everything looks fine and you still can't figure out why the calls slowed down, schedule a call with us. We'll look at how your business is showing up right now, what your competition is doing, and exactly what to fix to get the phone ringing again.
Transcript
If your phone was ringing every day and then one week it just went quiet, I want you to hear this. almost never the economy. And it's almost never that people stop needing what you do. Most of the time, something broke. the rest of the time, someone passed you while you weren't looking. stay with me because in the next 15 minutes, I'm going to tell you how to tell which one it is. you'll know exactly what needs to be fixed to get the phone ringing again. Welcome to the Marketing Domination Podcast. My name's Sean Garner, and this show is for local service business owners. Every single week, I'm going to teach you exactly what needs to be working in your marketing in plain English with no tech jargon.
Sean (00:31)
you can know exactly what you need to grow your business without becoming a marketing expert. So let's get into it. Here's a common scenario that happens whenever someone books a strategy call with me on the website. start to hear about their story, right? They've got a great business. been around for years, they've got solid reviews, and they'll typically say something like this: know, man, Sean, we we used to be getting, you know, 15, 20, 30 calls a day, getting tons of good solid reviews, it seems like almost overnight for the past six months. Everything is just shut down, and we're lucky now to get one call
Sean (01:02)
a day. I've already tried cutting prices, running discounts, maybe even trying to do some social media posts, but nothing seems to be working. And the business owner's frustrated, right? He's just laying awake at night wondering if the business is even gonna make it. then we start to look at his account and we start doing an audit and we see this suspended account under review. Something has happened to where their Google Business profile needs re-verification. Or maybe an ad account has got shut down. And what happened was those notifications were going to an old email inbox that nobody ever checks,
Sean (01:33)
and everything just broke, but nobody was paying attention to it. See the business owner thought they had a demand problem, but they really had a broken pipe. And this is unfortunately not. an uncommon thing. It is a lot of times, business owners, you're in the day-to-day trying to just keep the business going, doing the actual thing that it is that you do, and you're not paying attention to things like domains that need to be re-registered, Google business profiles that might have triggered a re-verification because somebody accidentally changed things. And so if you don't know what to pay attention
Sean (02:05)
you're not gonna know where to start looking when you see these leads fall off. Because see, there's really two reasons why calls disappear. And whenever you know which one you're dealing with, you're gonna know exactly where you need to look and what you need to fix to get the phone ringing again. So there's two different ways that these calls go away and they feel totally different. So I call it either the cliff or the fade. And so the cliff, this is where calls seem to almost drop off overnight. Whenever that happens, it's almost always technical. Something broke, something got suspended, expired, or got shut off.
Sean (02:42)
the second one would be the fade, right? It just kind of slowly starts to drift down over months, over years. That's almost Always competition. You stop pushing where somebody new moved in and started pushing a lot harder. but most business owners they treat both the same way, right? You're gonna panic, you're gonna freak out, cut prices, try a special offer, or maybe even fire the marketing agency. But the fix for a cliff and a fix for a fate are two completely different solutions. business owners will often ask me, you know, whenever I see these calls drop, you know, should I just cut my prices?
Sean (03:12)
not until you know why. If something is broken, cutting prices just means you'll make less on the few calls that you still actually get. So let's start with fixing the cliff, those immediate drop-off issues, because that's the one you and the fix could be sitting in your inbox right now. and they're almost always coming from one of three different places. Number one is your Google Business Profile. Open it up. Hopefully you know how to access it. If you don't, just go to Google, then you can look, make sure that you're logged in on the top right. Click those three little dots, go to businesses, you can just Google your business name. And if you're logged in with that Google Business Profile account, it should pull up your Google Business
Sean (03:47)
Then you can also go and if whenever you open that up, if you see any red banner that says under review, needs review or anything like that, immediately click on that. And look at that issue and get that issue resolved. See if you go to Google and you just Google your business name, or if you search your business name and main service, what you should be able to see is your Google Business Profile pull up. should be able to see the primary category listed that's correct with the right hours, right phone number, and address. This is how you should
Sean (04:18)
look at these things because this is another common thing that I see with businesses is sometimes a phone, well, maybe they had a track. Tracking phone number that set up and that account got shut down, or maybe they changed service providers, their website address changed and their URL is no longer valid. Make sure that everything on your Google Business profile is accurate and it works. Try clicking on the link. Well, I had somebody yesterday book a call with me and we are going through and auditing their account, and the URL was typed correctly on their Google Business profile, but it wasn't clickable because when somebody pasted it in, they put a
Sean (04:51)
space in there. And so they when every time you'd click on the link to their website for the Google Business Profile, it was broken. sometimes these little detail things are what catch you and get things broken. And they're things that if you're not paying attention or your agency is not paying attention to those things, you could be losing leads because it's just broken and it's such a simple fix. Another thing that we see oftentimes when it comes to the Google business profile is somebody has done something. Accidentally to trigger a re-verification and they weren't paying attention to it. So maybe somebody well intentioned went in and was trying to add
Sean (05:23)
new, you know, subservices or subcategories, maybe some new services. Maybe they were updating a phone number or they were trying to tweak the name of how it's spelled on the profile. Well, if they're not paying attention, that can trigger a re-verification. And so you, as the business owner, can still see your listing if you're looking at it. But if you look under your business settings, it will say, Re-verification needed. So a lot of times business owners will be like, no, no, it's working. I can see it, your customers can't see it. And what's crazy about the re-verifications is I've even seen this in some situations, is where people can still leave you a review.
Sean (05:55)
we had one person that didn't notice this for months because they had the Google review link in their automations. So people were still able to leave reviews for their customer, or their customers were still able to leave them reviews, but weren't actually able to be discoverable on the Google Map Pack because. They were sending them a direct review link, so that was still pulling up. But if you try to pull up the Google business listing, it wasn't there because somebody had accidentally triggered a re-verification and the business owner never ever got So a lot of times people ask, you know, well, why would Google suspend me if I didn't do anything wrong?
Sean (06:27)
It's typically not because you did anything wrong per se. It's just because you did something that triggers one of their re-verifications. Maybe it's something, you know, like change of address, change of key services that you're listed or you've added some services that were unrelated. It's not that you did something wrong but you did it in a way that Google really didn't like So now if your profile looks fine don't relax yet because the second cliff is even faster and the calls stop the same day it happens and that is your ad accounts. So what should be happening is your ads are running and the account is in good standing
Sean (07:02)
verification is currently Current and the card on file works. This is how to tell if it isn't. Log in and look for red banners. If you log into your Google Ads account and you see any red banners, any notifications, please look at those things and address them. Advertiser verification that needs to be resubmitted is another thing that we see often. Very popular with local service ads, getting those shut down is that a license, a background check, or your insurance is lapsed, because a lot of times you have to submit those to Google annually. And if you don't do it, guess what? Google's just gonna shut it down, and they're not often gonna tell you, or if they do,
Sean (07:34)
oftentimes so many business owners you get so many emails from Google or emails that seem like spam. you just kind of delete those or ignore those, and and they often just get lost. Unfortunately, we saw this happen to somebody the other day because they had been getting emails about renewing their domain, and we did our weekly or our daily check, and it showed that they had zero hits to their website. So I immediately freak out, open up their website. Website and realize their domain is shut down. Immediately call the business owner and they're like, so that's what those emails were that I've been getting for the past month. yes, you have to pay attention to those things.
Sean (08:07)
You do have to pay to keep those things active. so thankfully they were able to get it done. And then within a couple hours, everything was up and running. But a lot of times this stuff can go on for weeks or months without the business owner even paying attention to it or realizing it because, like I said, you got so many things going on, and then Google is not going to Help you with those things, right? They're a huge company. And unfortunately, taking care of small business owners is not their priority. So when the ad stops, the calls stop that same day. That's the one thing with paid ads, right? It's you're paying to have it show up. It's not like organic traffic where it could slowly dwindle off.
Sean (08:41)
That paid traffic, you will see it instantly with those ads. And the most common one is those local service ads pause because, like Alex said, a license or a background check expired and nobody noticed really. you're saying, well, somebody else runs my ad, so how would I even know? I'm gonna tell you this: agency red flag. If you're not able to log in and see the account yourselves, that's a whole separate problem. And we've done another thing about agency owner red flags. You should always have owner and admin access to all of your accounts. If you're not able to log in and see these things yourself,
Sean (09:13)
That's another problem, but at least make sure that the agency that's currently managing it can at least verify that stuff for you today and then get you access.
Sean (09:54)
So the third cliff is probably the sneakiest of all because everything can look fine from the outside and nothing's flashing red, but it's costing you sales calls every single day. And it's this, your website. So how to tell if it isn't? So, this is what should be happening on your website. It should load fast on a phone. It should show the little lock and the secure thing. Whenever you're looking at the little URL symbol on it, you should see something that says like SSL or secure. phone number should be clickable. The form should actually send. You should not get any type of error page on a site or anything like that
Sean (10:27)
whenever the page loads. Unfortunately, what I see happen again on clients' websites whenever they reach out. is a lot of times that they'll have the SSL or the security has lapsed or what's happened is it might be active but they got the wrong URL in their Google business profile. So the non-SSL version that's the non-secure one is loading for people and so it's throwing off tons of errors. A lot of times especially if a website hasn't been updated or a plugin or theme is out of date, a contact form could get broken. Maybe you have lots of connections or automations like
Sean (10:59)
Zapier and stuff like that. And it's set up and it's not firing the automations properly. And you know, it looks like those forms are going, but you don't realize that those forms aren't properly being synced to the CRM, automations aren't firing, and things aren't working. So is actually a huge thing that happened this week with WordPress and those PHP updates. Even the FBI sent out an update and everything about that, about how the the website isn't being kept up to date and everything. So that's one of those things to where you have to always be checking those things. You your internal team or hopefully your agency
Sean (11:30)
is always running checks on those things. That's one of the things that we do for our clients is we're always checking the forms, automations, running tests to make sure that things are working. So what if you do all those three checks and nothing seems to be broken? most likely you don't have a cliff, you have a fade. And honestly, the fade is the one that should worry you more. So when those calls slowly seem to start dropping off and you have that fade, that has to do with competition has moved in. And you either have let your foot off the gas or they're hitting it a lot harder than you are. So this is what should be happening. You should be holding or growing your spot on Google in AI overviews compared to other businesses that you compete with.
Sean (12:08)
This is how to tell if you aren't. Go into Google or ChatGPT now, right? and all of these different platforms and Search for your main service in the way that a customer would, like plumber near me, med spa near me, from a few spots around town, because one of the things to know is This is a side note here. lot of business owners will think that their Google business profile is fine and ranking great because they're checking it in their office. Well, one of the ranking factors on Google Map Pack is proximity. So if you're looking for a plumber near you and you're Googling it from your office, guess what? You better show up number one on that spot because that's where you are. So check the Map Pack from a couple of different ranking spots around town. and you should be able to see that and you should know those things.
Sean (12:49)
Also, you should be having a marketing agency showing these rankings and keeping track of this and competitors for you. an another topic, another episode. So look at those people that are ranking, see if there's anybody that is above you now that wasn't a year ago. And you know, look at things like how many reviews they have, how many have they gotten in the last few months. because ranking an SEO is not just something that you earn once and keep, it's a race and it's relative. So just because you were number one. doesn't mean that you get to stay number one.
Sean (13:19)
I want you to that. Just because you have hired an agency or you've done SEO and you've gotten to number one, it doesn't mean that you get to stay number one. See, this is a race, and this is I I like to talk about it a lot, like kind of like a marathon, right? if a new competitor moves in and gets their profile built right and collects reviews every single week, adds pages for all the services, locations, builds authority, does lots of link building, digital PR, and they run a real SEO strategy. And you're just kind of coasting, they can pass you in a matter of months. That's honestly from the flip side, one of my favorite things to do is whenever we get hired by a new business or even a business that's been
Sean (13:57)
In service for a long time, and we get to pass some of these legacy businesses that have been in just because they got comfortable, they got complacent. And that can happen. A lot of times, business owners that have been in business for a long time they think, you know, no, no, we're good. We've been here for 20 years, we're good, we're number one. Well, if you're not careful and you don't keep that momentum going, you can get passed. See, the fate is sneaky because it's slow. One fewer calls a week doesn't scare anybody. Six months later, you're down 40%.
Sean (14:27)
So one note on this is if you are in a seasonal business, is don't necessarily just look month over month, but I like to look year over year, especially things that are like landscaping and things that are highly seasonable businesses. So that's where you really truly have to know your numbers to make sure it is not just a slow season, but you're not falling into a trap of that drift. So let me give you something that you can do this week. It's not a tool, it's not a software in just 10 minutes and you can do it on your phone. So here is the 10 minute check. So number one, I want you to Google your business name on your phone.
Sean (15:03)
Check out your Google Business Profile. Is it there? Is it open? Is it correct? Number two, I want you to open your website on your phone. Does it load? Does it show the little lock? Does the form send? Fill out the form. Try and schedule an appointment yourself. Does it actually work? Call your own business phone number. Make sure it is clickable, especially from mobile. Third is log into your ads accounts. Do you see any red banners, any verification requests, or declined payments? Number four is search your Main service plus near me. So you know, like Botox near me, functional medicine near me, hormone therapy near me, and then look and see who's in the top three and how many reviews they have. Fifth thing is I want you to pull your call count month by month for the last six months. See, do you have any cliffs or any fades?
Sean (15:51)
if one of those first three things turns up something, then you found your clift. if they're all fine and your calls show a slow slide, then it's a fade and that's a strategy problem, not a broken part. so the owner that thought the market had dried up, it hadn't. His listing had just switched off and nobody had told him. So remember, if your calls fell off a cliff, something broke. If they faded, someone passed you. And there's some competition that's moved into the area we gotta go dominate. So run the 10-minute test this week. If you find something that's broken, you're not sure how to fix it, or everything looks fine
Sean (16:22)
and you still can't figure out why your phone's gone quiet, schedule a call with me, go to seangarner.co, book your strategy call, that will be with me, and we will do this complete full audit for you so you can see exactly how your business is performing now, what the competition is doing, and exactly what you need to do to fix it so you can grow your business, dominate online and serve the people you are called to serve. Next. Cause that's exactly what we do on those strategy calls. They are there to give you strategy. You will have all the clarity that you need to one, obviously see if it's a good fit for us to work together, but you will know if it's not exactly what you need to do to get your business to go.
Sean (16:59)
So thanks so much, guys, for listening to the Marketing Domination Podcast. Next week, you are gonna wanna check out that episode because we are gonna talk about why businesses with the most reviews aren't always number one on Google Maps. And if you're not number one, exactly what you need to do. Have an awesome day, and we'll see you on the next one.
