Dumpster Rental SEO Tips to Get More Leads

Tim: Thank you so much. Thanks, everyone, for being here. So today, like it says, we’re going to be talking about SEO strategies for your dumpster rental business. This is something that, in my experience, is probably one of the most misunderstood parts of any business, not just marketing but SEO. There is a ton of misinformation out there about what you should be doing, what you can be doing, what you shouldn’t be doing. Unfortunately, that creates the ability for companies to come in and take advantage of that knowledge. I see it all the time. Hopefully, the stuff that I’m going to give you today is going to give you some insight into what’s real, what’s not real, and leave you with some things that you can do for your business that will help your visibility in SEO.

Agenda:

• Defining Terms: I’m going to go over a few terms that I will use throughout the presentation so you guys understand what I’m talking about.
• Types of SEO: There’s multiple different types. Depending on where you’re at with your business, some can be relevant and some may not be at all.
• Three Strategies: We’re going to walk through three strategies for your business. These are going to be SEO strategies you can use that are free and very impactful for your business. A lot of companies overlook these strategies.
• AI and SEO: Thank you to Joe for this one. He and I were chatting last night, and he asked me about AI and SEO. I’ve heard a few other people bring up what is AI SEO? How do I use that for my business? I created a few slides on that so that I can cover what it is, how to get ranked with AI, and come up in some of those searches.
• At the end, I have a free SEO checklist for you. We also have an SEO playbook that you can grab from us. Either download it from our website, or Kelsey has a box of those playbooks. That playbook actually goes into a lot more depth than I will today and is fantastic. Be sure to grab one of those.

Defining Terms:

• Keyword: I think most people have heard about a keyword. A keyword is just what you type into Google when you’re searching for anything. It’s a simple thing but more relevant to organic SEO than it is to local SEO.
• Backlinks: A backlink is a link from another site that is pointing to you. Backlinks are one of the biggest parts of SEO, and the easiest way to think about it is it’s like getting a thumbs up from other companies. The more thumbs up you get, the more Google trusts you. SEO is all about trust. That’s really what you’re going for. Google refers you when you’re coming up in their search results. It’s like them recommending you as, “Here’s who we’re recommending that you go to to get that knowledge.” In order to get that referral, Google has to trust you. The more backlinks you have, the more thumbs-up and trust, the more likely you’re going to come up.
• Directory Listings: These are important for local SEO. Local SEO is when you’re coming up for local searches or even in Google Maps. Usually, the way I explain this is when I was a kid, there was this thing called a phone book or the yellow pages. A lot of people don’t know what that is anymore. When you wanted to look up a business, you had to grab that book to find the business and their information. If you lost that book, there was no way to get a hold of anyone. You’re toast. That’s what directory listings are. Yellow pages still exist today; it’s just online now. More directory listings mean more trust votes or up votes, making you more trusted by Google because it’s your business information across all of these sites, like Yellow Pages, Facebook, Google Business Profile, Yelp. There are thousands of directories you can get listed on. That doesn’t mean all of those are good. For the most part, there’s about 50 to 100 that are really high quality. You want to be on those. The rest, you want to be very cautious of. They may not be super beneficial, and bad directories can hurt your business. Just like good things can be thumbs-up, there are also thumbs-down. Be careful of those. Don’t just go have someone do a thousand listings for you for a hundred bucks and think that’s great. That’s usually pretty bad.
• Domain Authority: Domain authority is not a Google score. It was created by SEO software. One of the big ones is Semrush or AHREFS, two of the biggest SEO software tools in the game. Domain authority tells you how impactful or trusted your website is in Google’s eyes. It takes a look at different ranking factors and comes up with a score on a scale of 0 to 100. Depending on where you’re at, it’s about how easy it’ll be for you to rank in the search engines. There are over 280 ranking factors that Google looks at when it’s ranking your website. Most people know about five to ten of those and focus on them, but there are 280 that we know about. Google doesn’t tell us what they are; we usually have to guess.
• On-Page SEO: This means tweaking your website content so that Google understands who you are and what you’re doing. It sounds simple, but I see a lot of people getting it more wrong than right. If you fill it with too much information or try to stuff too many keywords in there, Google will be confused and will move on to someone else. You want to keep it simple. That’s important for AI search too. AI likes it really simple, and we’ll get into that a little bit later. On-page SEO is just optimizing your website so that Google can quickly read it and understand who you are.
• Local SEO: Local SEO is a big one. Local SEO is what everyone here wants to rank for. Directory listings, on-page SEO, and reviews are going to be your biggest track to ranking for local SEO. Local SEO is primarily focused on Google Maps. When you search for “dumpster rental near me,” the first thing that comes up is a map, showing your business. That’s local SEO. Everything below that that’s listed normally is organic SEO, a different type of SEO. We’re going to focus on local SEO as it’s easier, less expensive, and more beneficial for your business.

There are three types of SEO, and what they actually do.

• Harmful SEO: This one I see all the time. It’s an SEO company that people will work with, and they’re charging $200 to $500 a month for SEO. Generally, they are on some third-party website like Fiverr or Freelancer. You’re working with them. The problem is they’re using really poor backlinks. When Google views those backlinks, they are basically down votes because they’re not from good websites. They’re either brand new websites with zero domain authority, or they’ve been around for a long time but are really spammy. They’re full of spammy content and just putting you on there because it’s cheap and easy. When you do stuff like that, you’re not getting your website thumbs-up. You’re doing the opposite. You have to be really cautious of harmful SEO. It looks appealing because of the price tag, but in the long run, it’ll hurt you. Eventually, Google will stop showing you in the search results if you get too many bad backlinks.
• Mid-Tier SEO: This starts around $1,500 to $3,500 a month. These are real backlinks from relevant sites, relevant blogs to your industry that have been around for years and get tens of thousands of hits per month. These are not cheap. Not every business needs SEO. I think this should be said. It’s beneficial if you’re in a competitive market; it can be very beneficial. However, if you’re in a smaller market with maybe two, three, four competitors and those competitors have a poor Google business profile with maybe 10 to 15 reviews, you can own that market by getting 16 reviews without spending a ton on SEO.
• High-End SEO: This starts at about $4,000 and goes up to $100,000 plus. That’s for corporations. This is high-end, usually national or even global SEO. The reason some people would want to go with mid-tier SEO for a dumpster rental company is depending on your goals. What are you looking to do with your business? Is it your nine-to-five you enjoy and will continue for 20 years? That’s fantastic. You may not need SEO. Or are you looking to build your business up to sell it in five or ten years? If you want to sell it and exit, SEO helps you get there fast. When someone looks to buy your business, one thing they look at is the organic traffic. Organic traffic is free business. It’s similar to owning a rental property and wanting to list it on Airbnb or VRBO because of the traffic. You wouldn’t list it on a site with no traffic, just like people don’t want to buy a business without a lot of SEO and organic traffic.

Those are some of the tiers of SEO to be aware of.

Strategy One: Reviews

Reviews have the biggest impact on your local visibility than anything else for your business. You can do all of the SEO, but reviews are going to get you there.

Reviews aren’t hard to get, but they require some effort. You need to ask every customer at the end of the job. Ask for a review. You can text, email, or talk to them in person. It’s easy to do, but ask. That’s the one thing everyone’s always like, “How do I get more reviews?” It’s like, “Did you try asking?” Most people say no. Try asking. It’ll change everything.

Reply to reviews. When you get reviews, reply to them. You don’t have to say anything long-winded—just, “Thanks, we appreciate your business.” That’s plenty. Replying to reviews is a ranking factor with SEO. Google sees that as engagement. Engagement is big and helps you out. Every review you get is a thumbs-up ranking factor for SEO. The more you have, that’s equivalent to backlinks. Google loves it. It shows that you’re a relevant business.

Negative reviews are significant, too. A lot of people freak out about negative reviews, but they can be good as long as you don’t get too many. I was talking to someone the other day. They went out to a restaurant and saw 200 five-star reviews and no negative reviews. It seemed fake because it probably was. You can’t make every customer happy. You’re always going to get negative reviews, and they can be good because it shows that it’s real. Every person knows what it’s like dealing with difficult people. You’re not always going to make everyone happy and will complain.

It’s how you respond to that negative review that benefits you. When they leave that review, respond to it publicly on Google. Don’t start arguing with them. That’s the worst thing you can do, but let them know, “We’re really sorry that that happened to you. We’d love to talk to you about this more. Please reach out to us.” That’s it. Acknowledge it. Be professional and don’t just throw it away like nothing. You just took a negative review, and that client did you a favor because Google sees that. Google sees the negative review, but they also see you engaging with it. That’s a good business owner and a trust builder. So, make sure you respond to every single review, getting as many reviews as possible. Email, text, etc., whatever you need to do to get those—those are worth their weight in gold. And 95% of people read online reviews before making a purchase.

Strategy Two: Google Business Profile

I’m assuming many people here know what that is. If you don’t, Google Business Profile is free. You can set it up at google.business.com. It’s a directory listing technically, but it’s also a huge part of your business. It’s where your reviews go; it’s where almost everything goes. Google Business Profile started off as a social media platform to compete with Facebook, but that didn’t work out. So, they transitioned it to Google Business Profile, directly facing businesses. When you set it up, a lot of people want to list all the locations they service, but Google doesn’t look at your website for that information anymore. They look at Google Business Profile. So, to come up in more areas, the first place to ensure that’s listed is in your Google Business Profile.

There’s a lot I see people missing with Google Business Profile. With Google, if you only have your profile halfway filled out, if someone’s applying for a job and they hand in a half-filled resume, are you taking them seriously? Probably not. If your Google Business Profile is only halfway done, Google won’t take you seriously either. Use every feature in there because it’s there for a reason. Google does care about it. Add products to Google Business Profile. Add a service area. Post weekly updates. There is a social aspect to Google Business Profile. These don’t need to be big, usually small, like 300 words or less. Most people won’t see them, but that’s not the point. The point is you’re interacting with Google, and Google loves it. Upload photos. Photos are essential because the photo search is the fourth search engine out there. The first is Google. The second is YouTube. I don’t know the third one, but the fourth is image search. Having images tagged with your name, dumpster size, etc., means you’re coming up for more searches, not just text search. SEO isn’t just about coming up at the top of Google anymore. There’s a lot of different spots you can come up now: video, image, FAQ section in Google, AI content, map pack. There’s all these pieces of SEO and areas you can come up in. Uploading at least 50 photos is super important. Make sure you’re not just uploading photos of dumpsters. People want to see who you are.

This is true with your website too, and I see this all the time. People have all these great photos of their trucks and dumpsters, and there’s not a human on their entire website. One of the biggest issues with that is trust is important. The second most visited page on most websites is the “About Us” page because people want to see who you are. If your “About Us” page shows your team and a little about you, it builds immediate trust, and now they want to do business with you. If there’s nothing there or just more pictures of dumpsters, there’s no connection. So, make sure when you’re uploading photos, it’s not just dumpsters. It’s also you, your team, etc.

Strategy Three: Blogging

Content is king, and it’s always been king. Google loves serving up content. That’s really what it’s doing—serving up information. You want to give it information to serve up, and that is blogging. This is one thing most businesses do not do. It’s easy to do, especially with AI today. You can do it easily. It doesn’t have to be huge long-form content. At the last company I was at, we did blogging for beer. It meant submitting a blog post as a team. At that time, there was probably about a hundred of us. You could submit a blog post to our marketing team, and they’d post it on our website. Whoever’s blog post did the best, got the most views, got a six-pack of beer of their choice. It was simple, but having a good blog written back then cost two to three hundred dollars. Instead, we spent on a six-pack of beer. Our traffic at that site—bless you—was huge. At that time, one of our blog posts brought in about 25% of our traffic. Blogging is incredibly important. It doesn’t have to be anything crazy. Dumpster sizes, local job stories, how it works or what to expect, recycling or local disposal tips. Blogging is important because not only is content a ranking factor, but when I talked about trust, getting thumbs-up from blogging is critical. More blogging makes Google see you as an authority in your industry. A good blog with quality information that people read makes Google think, “This is an authority. We’re going to rank them higher.” Google ranks authority sites higher, and you become more trusted and show up for more keywords. Blogging is extremely important to your business and very easy to do. It doesn’t have to be a 2,000-word blog to be beneficial. It can be 300, 600 words. I recommend 500 or more, but it doesn’t need too much more. You’re also able to take that content and use it elsewhere. You can post it to your social media. That’s something people ask a lot: “What do I post to my social media? What should I put on there?” A link to your blog gets two up votes for the price of one. Links from social media are thumbs up, a backlink. The more you get, the more people interact with it, the more Google’s going to love you.

AI and SEO

This is a tough one. After I talked to Joe yesterday, I thought a lot about this because there’s a concept out there where people think AI SEO can do it. Just to let you know, it can’t. It’s a common misconception. It would be like saying if you don’t want to hire drivers anymore because you’re tired of paying them, you’ll hire AI for the driving. You’d say, “Tim, that makes no sense.” That’s how much sense AI SEO means. SEO requires manual work. There’s a reason those prices are so high—it’s because there’s manual work. You have to search, make connections, and get backlinks from quality blogs. There’s a lot to be done manually that can’t be automated with AI. But there are four things about AI you can control. These are more complex, but as we get through them, you’ll see they make sense.

One thing that’s huge right now is EAT. Everybody’s talking about it for their websites. It means experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. Having these on your site is extremely important. On your blog, mention years in business, get reviews, and reply to build trust with Google and customers. All these things help you build trust. Everything goes back to trust. EAT dials down to how trustworthy your business is. Are you doing things that are trustworthy? When people see you, are you an authority in the industry? How big is your blog? Are you sharing information and helping out or just there to rent the dumpster? Google looks at everything. If you have content that engages the user and educates them, you become an authority. You become more trusted, and that’s what EAT is. Look at your website—does it show your experience? Does it show your expertise? Is it trustworthy? Are you putting on there that you have 250 five-star Google reviews? Make sure you’re calling all that out because AI scans and looks for these things. If it’s not there, it moves on.

NLP: This stands for Natural Language Processing. It’s how we speak—human talk versus AI. AI can be long-winded and loves making things up, which is fine but has its place. Search engines use NLP to understand intent and context. Use natural conversation language. Answer related questions in line or FAQ sections. Basically, get to the point. We’ll give you an example of non-NLP versus NLP on the next slide, but first…

The RankMath plugin, if you’re on WordPress, can help you optimize your website. Many think SEO plugins do SEO for you. They do not. SEO plugins are like training wheels. SEO and on-page optimization are complex. H1 tags, title tags, meta descriptions, alt tags, schema—all that needs to be done, and most don’t know how. RankMath is popular. There’s Yoast, All-in-One. These plugins help you optimize your site so Google and AI understand it. AI looks for certain schema, pieces of code that tell it things like, “This is an FAQ section.” Otherwise, they don’t always know. It lays it out so AI knows how to read it and understands where to put it.

Proven SEO Fundamentals: This is the biggest in the last 20 years. Last night, Joe asked me not just about today but five years down the road. What’s it going to look like? Man, that had me spinning because I don’t know. I remember when the internet first started—AOL chat rooms, talking to strangers online. We look at that now and say, “Absolutely not.” At that time, we didn’t know. Where was this going? Websites didn’t exist. It was like three news sites and AOL. We didn’t understand where it was going, which rapidly progressed to today. Trying to figure out in five years where you want to be—I’ve done SEO for 20 years, and I can tell you the stuff I’m sharing today hasn’t changed. Different words like EAT and NLP, AI tools, things like that. AI’s been part of SEO for 20 years. Tools have done stuff for us a long time. Google is aware and quickly shuts you down. In the last 20 years, the most important is being trustworthy, giving helpful content, and ensuring when someone’s on your website, they’re engaged and getting what they need. Less than two seconds to convince them to stay, or they’ll leave. Don’t have a biography on the first page—good start. I see that.

What’s happening in 5 years? I don’t know. So much could happen, but in the last 20 years, SEO has stayed the same: backlinks are important, trust is important, quality content is important. Don’t overthink it. Most are probably doing it right. Focus on reviews. If you can, blog post. How often? However often you want. Once a month if you’re not doing it now—better than before.

NLP Example: Not just important on your website, but in communication, blogs, everything. Someone asks Google, “How much will fit in a 20-yard dumpster?” Non-NLP is old-school SEO writing, stuffing keywords, long-winded intros, prioritizing volume over clarity, answering late—like looking up a lasagna recipe, scrolling past a story just to find the recipe. We hate it, Google hates it, AI hates it. Don’t do it.

NLP-optimized content is focused, direct. Answer the question, “How much will fit in a 20-yard dumpster?” A 20-yard dumpster holds about six pickup trucks of debris, best for garage cleanouts, small remodels, roofing jobs. That content AI will grab all day long, and so will Google. Direct and to the point. After answering, dive into more about your 20-yard dumpsters—fine. First, answer the question. If it’s in FAQ, answer it first. Our blogs average 1,500 words, and at the top, key takeaways for NLP, AI content, people also ask sections— those points top of the blog. What do we want you to know, takeaway? Right at the top. Then, the rest of your blog—AI and Google use that information.

So, that’s the NLP example. Hope that made sense. Some of that was high-level, but most are doing it right. I’ve seen a ton of dumpster websites with small tweaks and changes. But again, focus on reviews. Those are your gold mine. Reviews will get you there. Companies with domain authority of 2 out-ranking a 40 simply because of more reviews—local businesses—what Google cares about.

This next one you can photograph or grab from Kelsey. Your SEO checklist: on Google Business Profile, add products, post weekly, upload 50 photos, add FAQ—ask your own questions—answered by you. You’re adding content to Google Business Profile that’s keyword-rich, ranking for all. Get more reviews, ask often, reply to every review. Keep hours updated—Google’s dinging businesses for discrepancies.

FAQ

What are the most impactful SEO strategies for a dumpster rental business?

The most impactful SEO strategies include focusing on customer reviews, optimizing your Google Business Profile, and regularly posting blogs. These strategies enhance local visibility and build trust with Google.

How important are reviews for local SEO?

Reviews are crucial for local SEO as they significantly impact your business’s visibility. Google considers reviews as engagement, which helps build trust and ranks your business higher in local searches.

What should I include in my Google Business Profile?

Ensure your Google Business Profile is fully completed with your service areas, products, weekly updates, and at least 50 photos. This interaction with Google boosts your visibility and trustworthiness.

How does blogging benefit SEO for a dumpster rental business?

Blogging provides valuable content that positions your business as an industry authority. Regular blog posts attract organic traffic, improve visibility, and can be easily shared on social media to enhance engagement.

What role does AI play in SEO for dumpster rental companies?

AI assists in processing natural language and optimizing content for user intent. However, SEO requires manual efforts for link building and content creation, as AI cannot automate these critical SEO components.