The best people to help you get more customers are your current and past customers.  They give you referrals, reviews, results you can showcase, and more.  The second-best people are your almost-customers.  They give you intel you won’t get anywhere else – if you ask them for it.  You can use that intel to improve your visibility in the local search results and to get more customers out of the deal.

My suggestion for you today is simple: send a quick survey to the people who chose not to work with you.  The insights you get can be gold for your business in general and for your local SEO effort in particular.  You may not want to spend any more time with almost-customers or ask anything of them, and the feeling may be mutual.  But the alternative is to get nothing from those people – or nothing but frustration.  You may have spent 40 minutes on the phone with them, driven to their house to do an estimate, or met them at your office and let them use your bathroom.  Don’t you want anything else out of the relationship?

The format doesn’t matter much.  I like Google Forms (it’s free and simple to set up), but it can be SurveyMonkey, an email, a piece of paper, or a phone call.  Whatever’s easiest for you and hardest for almost-customers to ignore.

The questions should be few and straightforward.  I am NOT suggesting you send 20 questions, because everyone will tune you out.  Maybe 3-5 questions that take a few neurons, or 6-8 questions that people can answer in their sleep.  Most or all of them should be things you really want to know, but that aren’t super-awkward for you to ask or for your almost-customers to answer.  Stick your neck out, but with your helmet on.  By the way, don’t expect nearly everyone to reply.  Most people will play possum.  And that’s OK: you only need feedback from a minority of your almost-customers.

So what should you send, exactly?  Below is an example you can copy and adapt, if you’d like.  A version of this has worked well for my clients.  On the off-chance you can’t see the embedded form, here’s the link.  You may need to sign into your Google account to see it.  (Please let me know in the unlikely event you still can’t access it.  Also, let me know in the comments or in an email if you’d like me to share a copy of the Google Form, so you can customize it.)

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All of the questions revolve around the big question: are you playing in the right saloon?  With just a few questions, and possibly after just a few answers, you can learn:

a. Roughly how many almost-customers come from Google vs. from other sources.

b. Where in Google they find you: Maps, AI Mode, the organic results, Google Ads, etc.  A lot of business owners DO ask this when a would-be customer first gets in touch, but most people provide vague answers, and most business owners don’t ask for specifics or follow up. Usually they don’t want to slow down possible customers with questions, for fear of scaring them off before they’ve paid for anything.  But now you’ve got nothing to lose.

c. What effect, if any, your reviews or videos or “content” have.  Are your blog posts worthless?  Probably.  Are your reviews helpful?  Probably.  

d. Whether the most-visible competitors are also the most likely to siphon customers away from you.  Sometimes the business that clobbers you in the 3-pack gets few calls, or gets solid calls and squanders the leads.  Often your lower-profile competitors do serious business.

e. How important your location is.  Are the people nearest to you also the most likely to become your customers, or are farther-away people a better fit?  (If you don’t already know where any given customer is from, you can ask.)

f. How important your prices are.  How often do would-be customers pick you over a competitor, or vice versa, because of cost?

And more.  Rank-trackers, the GBP dashboard, Google Analytics, and even Google Search Console can’t tell you all of that.

Asking those questions of customers (i.e. not almost-customers, but rather people who paid you at some point) is also smart, and I suggest you do it.  But if you only ask signed customers, the problem is confirmation bias.  Of course you hit a home run when everything lines up.  But how many more home runs might you hit if you adjust your swing a little, and how should you adjust your swing?

Those are just the basic questions, too.  I expect (and hope) you’ll customize them and add to them.  Here are some other nuggets you might want to dig out.  (You probably can’t ask about all of these, and you’ll want to phrase the questions in your own way.)

1. How do they refer to what you do?  Do almost-customers refer to your services or products in the same way that your signed customers do?  Do they call it the same thing you call it?  They probably won’t remember what exact term they searched for in Google, but you can always ask, and even if you don’t ask you can just pay attention to how they describe whatever it is you do for a living.  As I’ve written, this is the next-level approach to keyword-research.  The problem with most keyword-research is nobody can tell the difference between what terms customers search for and what terms question-askers search for.

2. Did they know about your niche from the start, or did they originally think you needed something or someone else?  It’s possible there’s a good related industry, or an adjacent family of search terms, that you don’t rank in (but maybe should).  A good reason for a thick-rankings strategy.

3. How long were they thinking about getting such-and-such service or hiring you?  Did they call you in their underwear during an emergency, or did they sit on the idea for a year or two?

4. How much research did they do?

5. How important are your operating hours, turnaround time, or overall availability?  (Should you specify 24/7 hours on your GBP page?)

6. Was there a piece of content on your site that they found helpful?  You might even determine whether that’s how they found you originally.

7. Was there a specific customer’s review they found powerful?  You might be able to get more like it, and to make those sorts of reviews more prominent on your site and in your overall strategy.

8. If you’ve got multiple locations, which location did they find in Google?  (One way to gauge which GBP pages are pulling the most or least weight.)

9. Do they remember what device or app they were using when they found you?

10. Was anything about your site difficult to use or figure out?

You get the idea.  You’re trying to figure out whether your local SEO strategy is working to the point that it gets you customers, or only working to the point that it gets you almost-customers.  You want to know whether you’re visible in the right niche, what other niches you might want to show up in, how to make your site more persuasive, and how to make the search results tilt in your favor before someone gets to your site.  Human nature doesn’t change, but it lumbers along a little differently from one situation to the next, and it’s always fascinating.

Of course, you should also ask landed customers similar questions.  You probably do that already, to one degree or another, but may not be in the habit or feel you have an easy-to-use format.  Here’s an example of a survey you can send customers – after your work has wrapped up, they’ve paid, and maybe a little time has gone by.  Compare the answers customers give you to the answers your almost-customers give you.  Look out for patterns and differences between those two groups of people, tweak your local SEO strategy accordingly, and you might just crack the code.

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What do you ask customers or almost-customers?  How do you ask them?  What local SEO strategy changes did you make, and how did those work out?  Any feedback on my surveys?  Leave a comment!