Lykken on Lending

Experience.com helps businesses enhance their online visibility and improve search engine rankings by leveraging Google’s algorithm in several strategic ways. Through these strategies, they effectively utilizes the intricacies of the Google algorithm to boost their clients’ SEO efforts, helping them to gain better visibility, drive traffic, and ultimately increase conversions through enhanced online presence and reputation management. Today, we have Scott Harris, CEO of Experience.com to share about how their platform will put you on top of the search engine.

Search Rank Platform with Scott Harris of Experience.com

Listeners, I’m excited to have back on the podcast. A good friend, Scott Harris, is CEO of Experience. com. We’re going to be talking about some of the new innovative things they’re doing there. If you know anything about Experience.com, they have innovation going at another level, what they’re doing and how to curate movement momentum towards you and your sales effort, man, wait till you see what he has for us, Scott, good to have you here, friend, so glad to have you back!

Hey, thanks for having us again on the show. I think it’s important. You should tell the story of when we first got started. We used to be social survey. when I first met you, somebody had said, Dave is really good at helping folks figure out their core messaging and when we were social survey, I think I spent several hours with you coming up to a very simple, succinct enterprise reputation management is where we started. It’s not exactly where we are today.

You’ve come so far from there, but it was really many people struggle, and I think that’s a good point that we can put in right here. It’s got many people struggle with articulating what they do, and I’m real big on boiling it down to the shortest, fewest number of words, describe it. I remember we were sitting in San Diego; we were at one of the MBA conferences and I have a picture of you when you came to it, you go I got it! that epiphany you nailed it. And from that point on, it really launched you. Your concept of what you’re doing is really exciting, but for those that do not know Experience. com, I can’t imagine that there’s anybody that doesn’t because you’ve got so much market share, but talk about experience.com, at least, the vision, what your goal is and then let’s get into the exciting things you’re doing today.

Yeah, great question. We are evolving into the place to find and refer the best professionals. In the past we were enterprise only and the enterprises would sign up and all their loan officers would be on the platform. And we would begin doing great work to help those loan officers grow their online presence under the guidance of they all worked for a customer. And when those loan officers would leave. They get really upset because it was like they lost all that work, and it was very early that we realized that the next thing we had to build was the way for those professionals to be able to build and manage their online presence forever.

And so individually is what you’re talking about?

Individually, they have to own it. That doesn’t mean the enterprise isn’t important. It’s even more critical because the enterprise powers, all of those profiles with automation, but an individual professional, think about it like LinkedIn, an individual professional builds and manages their professional network on LinkedIn, right?

When you change your jobs, you think, I got to go to LinkedIn and change my job. You think that right away, there’s not a place where a professional can say, where do I build and manage my online presence? and that’s what we’ve built here, is the ability for any professional in any world, not just real estate. Not just mortgage, and by the way, the fact that we’re not just mortgages is helping mortgage loan officers even more. So now every professional in the United States will have a free Experience.com profile that they can free.

Did I hear that right?

A free experience. Just like you have a free LinkedIn profile, there are pro features and there are free features, but to be honest, our free platform It’s more robust than most of our competitors paid platform.

That’s way to go. That’s smart. That’s just smart business to be able to, I believe in freemium, giving something of a premium value away for free. And then you draw people into a deeper experience once they get it and understand it, then oftentimes they’re willing to pay up for that deeper experience, but you’ve got some exciting new things going on Experience.com. I want to find out what those are. Share those with our listeners, talk about that.

What we’re doing right now is we’re releasing parallel verticals.

Let’s clarify that for the person that I hear the parallel verticals, put a little more meat on that.

Okay. So, I’m a loan officer and for years they’ve been saying, how do we partner with our realtor partners? and so we consider that a networked vertical, a parallel vertical and insurance. So, we release Mortgage, Real Estate and Insurance together. So now we have a half a million loan officers on the platform. We have 1.4 million realtors on the platform, and we’ve only got 400 and some thousand insurance agents, but we’re going to be rolling out the other 600,000 insurance agents. We also have in the platform, something called partner promotion, and this allows you to remove any ads or anything that’s on your profile and just put my partners and you can search your partners, you can pin them to your page and then it just promotes them on your page. But it also sends them a message that says, congrats so and so has promoted you. Click here to promote them back. and so, it’s this co marketing where it’s just a part of it. And you can just put your top eight professional partners on your page, it’s been a pretty big deal because with all the changes, loan officers are looking for ways to get more referrals and more referral partners and this value going into those real estate offices and the loan officer started going into real estate offices and sharing this free technology with these folks and getting those folks to pin them, to promote.

Yeah, that’s really good. First of all, you’ve been studying a lot of the Google algorithms and how to get people to show up and you’ve developed something that’s like credit karma and I want to get into that because this gets really exciting as far as how to connect with more people and get more business in which we all need these days.

Yeah. Remember that statement, I said, the place to build and manage your online presence and so what’s the, how what does that mean building manager online presence? What we had to do was we spent the last year and a half figuring out how to help people dominate on Google and on the other search engines and what that means is we had to break down the things that were important in those search algorithms. Think about it, I like to credit karma reference. Think about it like credit karma in this industry, in the mortgage industry, for years and it’s a little bit in the past now, but for years, the words credit repair were something that we heard every day, right? and then credit karma comes out and creates a mirror algorithm and stack ranks the things that are important and figures out the math and then exposes it. And then gives us calculators and tools. And now we all know, if you pay that with credit card down to here, you get this many points. If you pay it down to here, you get this many points, right? We all know how to manipulate it, what we should pay off, what we should increase the credit for, what we should pay down to get the points we need. And that’s what credit repair used to do. But now that there’s this algorithm, everyone can see and use the tools, there’s even calculators, there’s even a new intelligence tool that you can say, how do I get 12 more points? That’s what we want you to think the same way about your online search. The search engines use a model called PPR – Proximity, Prominence, and Relevance, and to figure out who to deliver when there’s local intent on a search. You might not know there’s 105,000 searches every second on Google, and 46% of those have local intent and so when they have local intent, that’s people looking for products and services like the ones that our customers offer. And so, we basically figured out local intent by stack ranking, all the things that tell Google that you have the product that the customer’s looking for, that you’re close to the customer, and that you’re good at what you do. Now, Google and the other search algorithms, it’s math to them and so how do you figure out the math? Google looks at a hundred or more different websites to see if you have the exact same address, the exact same products, the exact same name, address, phone number, title. Then they look at your website. You don’t even know how important your website is. It’s the most important citation. It’s your primary citation. That’s worth so much of the algorithm. You don’t have your hours on your website, your reviews on your website, your products and services. It hurts you even more and so they look everywhere, your connections, your backlinks, your social, all the different profile pages, your website, our website. That’s what we did. We figured out all the factors, stacked rank them, and then we give you complete visibility into where you stand online, and we give you a number, and then we tell you where your competition stands online and then we give you all the tools to fix it. Like it’s not just, here’s your gap. It’s here’s your gap and click here to fix it.

So, what we’re talking about here, in credit karma, you improve your credit score. What you’re talking about here is improve your visibility on the internet, not just social media, but it’s virtually anywhere, anyone is doing a Google search. Is that correct?

Yeah. We had a guy yesterday that claimed his profile and was under claimed.

What do you mean claimed his profile?

Okay. So, we haven’t released comms because we can’t keep up with all the activity. So, there’s so many people, thousands of people claiming their profile. Soon as we release comms, it’ll be tens of thousands and we’re trying to give our mortgage partners a head starts here. And so, this guy claimed his profile. He was under a hundred points. He got a call from one of our search coaches and we explained to him how to,

I love that search coaches. So, you have coaches that coach people,

Call people and help them with their free profiles because all the tides rise as each of these users add more data to the profile they go up and they’re bringing the whole audience up. More is more. So, this helps us, and it helps you. So, we got on this guy on the phone, and we explained what it was and walked him through it and helped him get a score up. He went from under a hundred points to over 600 points and he owns the number one position on Google search on Experience search in less than two hours.

You’re kidding me. And that is local to his community right there.

Local community. That’s right.

So, with someone searching for a loan officer in that community, he’s going to come up number one in the search that is so valuable.

And that’s where it starts because it’s top loan officers in. So, if you’re listening to this and you go to Google and you say top loan officers in your zip code or your city and state and click on it. You’ll notice Experience. com is on the first page, usually the one. Most often the one and the two, right? That’s how adopted this platform is. So many people are claiming, upgrading, updating their profile and that’s just bringing us up in every city everyday somebody says, Oh, search Columbus, Ohio. Oh, search such and such. And I’m like never searched that one. Let’s do that. And we’ll be the one and the two.

We did that yesterday when we were getting ready for this call. And you showed us a couple, we were searching some real small little communities here in Texas and I was amazed at who was popping up. This is such a powerful tool and I want to make sure I heard this correctly. You’re doing this. You’re providing search coaches, someone how to prove their search results for free accounts.

Absolutely. Every time somebody claims you should get a phone call, assigned to a search rank coach, the search rank coach will book a free 20 minute session, they’ll walk you through, they’ll help you get your points up, and they’ll actually show you how to look for your competitors and see where their scores are, and they’ll show you how to get that top 5 percent banner, and they’ll show you how that top 5 percent score is, and show you what you have to do to get to the first page. Now, that’ll change though, because as other people come in, they could jump you. So, you have to pay attention. Yeah,

If you look at some of the other engines that are out there, that are paid versions, people are paying good money to get a service that is inferior to what you’re giving away for free.

Yeah. So, if you’re using bird eyes and the podiums, those are good platforms. But our free platform is more robust than their paid platforms and they charge $300 to $500 a month for it. For a professional, if they want to upgrade and pay for realtor promotions, for referral center, for AI features, for Google authenticate more Google reviews, more Google post more. Again, understand this isn’t about Experience.com. Right? Experience.com is the platform to manage the Internet. Experience like common is not just a mortgage review platform, we pull in reviews from everywhere from Zillow, from Google, from Facebook, from all the platforms, any third-party platform you can pull in because it all matters to your online presence. Think of Experience. com like the place to manage the internet, not like a reviews platform that has to replace some other reviews platform. No, they all matter. That’s the problem. They all matter. And you can’t focus on everything. Experience.com can focus on everything.

That’s amazing. So, let’s get into what the difference is from the free version. If you’re doing all this for the free version, what else do you get for the paid versions?

Let’s talk about the free version. You get your profile, and so it’s public. You get the ability to get all the way up to 550 points on the 850-point algorithm. I’ll explain that in a second. You get to post, you get to collect reviews, request reviews, you get to reply to reviews. You can connect to Google employee reviews. You can connect to all the platforms and pull your views and that’s all free. So, creating reviews, getting more reviews, getting more Google reviews, connecting to Facebook, sharing your reviews on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and creating backlinks. That’s all free. That’s all free. Now, if you want to upgrade, it’s like a fit what our competitors charge and it’s unreal powerful, your professional profile. Now you can put your eight realtors. Now you can use the referral center. You can request them in bulk, or you can request them on it. You can give referrals, get referrals, track referrals and we know that referrals are all about when people refer you there, those customers look you up online to see if they trust the referral. So, we send them a link to your profile and your last five-star reviews to make sure you convert that. Now, in addition, we give you listings management. We give you that AI website analysis tool, that AI auto reply tool for your reviews. There’s Google posts, Google QA, Google analytics, listings, management, referral center, partner, promotion, pro branding. It’s unreal, all the extra you get and those features, a lot of those are features and connections and API integrations that we pay for and so we can’t really just give those away I can’t give you the points. If you don’t do listings, listings will create 70 pages for you and manage 70 pages with consistent, robust data. Again, and by the way, we’re giving you a discount promo code, so people probably get it super inexpensive through you. So, it’s even less expensive and I think if you upgrade with your promo code, I think it’s 59 bucks a month or something.

Wow. Talk about the score because you talk about the free version gets you up to a 500 score, but with the paid version, you can get up to 850. Now the reason that is, is because we have to connect to a hundred different APIs. There’s so much that we do. And so, the paid version, the points are about listings and web analytics. So again, listings, create and manage pages everywhere, including your Google, my business,

And you guys do that. You do that a hundred percent.

That’s right. We do it all. Again, we help you manage the entire Internet. So, if the answer is then we either have it or we’re building it. If there’s anything missing, and the points are about your website. Now, that’s the other thing. When you sign up for pro, we will literally go to your website and crawl it and look for your nap data. Make sure it’s exactly right. We’ll enrich our own data. If we find data that you’re missing, we will look for your about me, your hours, all your meta-attributes.

We’ll look for your reviews and the way you post them. So, make sure you’re doing it exactly right. We look for your load time, mobile responsiveness, everything that matters to the search engines, the way you index your photos, do you have secondary load that’ll slow down your load time. And so, we look at it like the search engines look at it and we say out of 250 points, you have 125. And then we say, here’s all the things you’re missing. And all you have to do, is do those things and you’ll optimize your site for the way Google and the search engines look at your site. And those are the two points features.

When I started looking at what it would cost to have someone come in and help you with how easy it is to discover you in that score that you’re talking about. You’d pay so much more just for a fraction of these services.

Remember credit repair. We used to pay big money for credit repairs because we didn’t know how to win. There wasn’t anything that showed us. That’s the same thing. Experience.com is the credit column of online search visibility. Now you can see it. And by the way, every doctor, every dentist, every chiropractor, every home services, every professional services, every financial services input, they’re all going in here, right? We have plans to add over 20 million profiles in the next 12 months.

Why should someone claim their profile now versus later and also get a little more granular about claiming your profile? That’s an expression. I understand the words, but it sounds like is that claiming your domain name.

So, the claim question is easy as just coming to Experience.com and searching for yourself or going to Google and searching for yourself. Most of the people that are claiming are just Googling themselves and finding themselves.

Is it possible for someone else to come in and claim your identity or your name and grab it from you? So, when we first launched, we had to happen twice and then we switched to magic links. So, it has to be your inbox or your cell phone number. so, we did have it. it’s a funny question. We did have it happen two times, so it’s no bueno, but out of millions of profiles, two times we can deal with two times. And then why now? The guy that I’m talking about, why should someone do it now? The guy I was talking about yesterday that went from under 100 points to 600 points and move to the first page of Google in two hours, that opportunity’s not going to be around for very long. First mover is everything right now. You want to get to the top and stay at the top, right? Yep. And you want to understand math. It’s really important for you to get in now, get the highest scores, connect all the review platforms and begin to understand the math. Do you mind if I help people a little bit with math?

Let’s talk about PPR. Let’s start with proximity. Proximity. Is the exact address proving to Google in the search engines. That you actually have a location that they can trust the way they do that is look at your website, Alexa, Waze, Bing, Yelp at all, everything they can find under different websites or more to make sure they’re looking for exact match, right? If you use sweet instead of pound, it’s a mismatch. Okay, so it’s exact robust consistent data everywhere so that’s proximity. So, they have to come up with a model that they can trust that people can’t spam. They’re trying to make sure because remember, we all trust Google. You don’t even realize that you trust Google. Do you understand that less than 1 percent of people navigate to page 2 of Google results? That’s how much this algorithm works. We all trust page 1. And do you understand that only 2 percent of people click on the ads and 39.8 percent of people click on the first organic search, we all skip the ads. Okay. So, proximity, consistent data everywhere. So, the algorithm trusts that you have a location. Relevance – If someone searches for a VA home loan and you don’t have the word VA home loan on your website, would you expect Google to send you that deal, that traffic, right? If you don’t show that you’re open on your website, you have to think the way the algorithm thinks, and so products need to be listed almost using search terms. First time home buyer. That should be a product. Okay. So, you list the products all that you have, and you try to marry them up to what people might search and make sure they’re on your website. They’re on experience, and we’ll make sure they’re everywhere else. That tells Google that you actually have the products. Relevance. Finally, are you any good at it Prominence. Now, Google doesn’t say, and the other algorithms don’t say, were you good at it? They say, are you good at it? You walk into a coffee shop, and you interact with some person behind the counter, and they make your day. The next time you walk in, they remember your name. They say, oh, do you want another flat white? You had a great experience. Oh, my God. These guys are the best. I’m going to go in every day. That person gets hired somewhere else. It’s going to be a different experience. Google uses recent reviews. A review today is worth more than a review a month ago and 12 months, The values diminish, there’s not a lot of value there and if you don’t reply to your reviews, you’re actually leaving a big no value a hole where text goes where data goes. Think about it like that too.

Don’t skip fields. If you get a new review with no reply, it hurts your score. because let’s say you have 75 recent reviews in the last 12 months and 1 of them gets 12 months in a day. Let’s say you get a new one. Oh, the 75th one drops down that had a reply.

Now I get it. I get it. Is this where your search coach comes in Scott? is this they’re monitoring or does your technology go in and start helping them?

We monitor them and we email them, and we text them the coaches. I want you to think about the coaches, like a quick start. Get off the right foot. Oh my God, there’s too much in here. What do I do first? Think about your coaches. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That’s smart.

That’s amazing. But the person still has to go in and do the responses and the replies. Is there technology that you see coming down the line, which can do some of those on an auto base? for individual users, they have the AI suggest, okay. So, we already have, they can already automate their replies. However, you have to click a button. For the enterprises. Now think about the enterprise. So, let’s say you’re a user and you’re managing the internet with this platform, right? and then your company signs up. All right. Now. We can help you take that to a whole new level because we can use AI PII redaction, AI spam filtration, we have AI auto reply. You don’t even have to log in. Some of the companies say, okay, if our people haven’t replied in seven days, reply for them. So, the AI will just reply. You can do trained auto reply. You can teach it how to reply and it will reply. You can connect it to your LOS and automate surveys at any moment. You can automate surveys post close. You can automate realtor surveys, title company surveys, mid process surveys. Literally when you take these individual profiles where you guys are all managing the internet and you plug them into an enterprise. It now just supercharges and automates almost everything.

You had mentioned when we talked the other day about web analytics module, talk a little bit about what does that do? What do you mean by web analytics module? Yeah, that’s the AI platform I told you about. that goes to your website. And analyze your website in the way that the algorithms will. That’s the one I explained. Sorry. That’s your primary website. It’s the most important part of the search algorithm is your website. And it is absolutely the place we’re finding the biggest errors. The biggest gaps is that these companies will have gorgeous websites that aren’t built for search.

And then you talked about mobile, the importance of the load speed on, when it comes to mobile these are all factors that when they come to work with you and then when they sign up, even for a free account, you’re helping them through all of these issues, making them aware of these issues, Scott, you’re going to get flooded?

We are flooded. Yesterday. We pushed pause on any more comms. we’re trying to get people hired as fast as we can. We’re going to re-release the comms on Monday.

That goes to the first mover advantage. People are picking up on this and I’m so excited to get this. We have got to get this interview published as quickly as possible. So, people, our listeners can, you had mentioned that you’re giving a code to our listeners for those that are signing up. I really appreciate that. Thank you so much.

We take it. We’ll add it to where we want them to go to the website and do that. You’ll be in a link in the communication in the description. That’s what I do.

Let’s put it on the screen and then have them go to the website. We will promote this as well. Listen, I want to make sure that if you are seeing this and that you get one really important point. Professionals need to own our online presence.

We got to stop outsourcing this, right? And we got to stop cobbling together products that aren’t connected and effective at solving the problem. Don’t worry about whether or not you have another reviews platform. They all matter, you have to manage your online presence everywhere. And now you can see the map. I know that these professionals are not doing it. Dave. They’re not managing it because they don’t know how. Yeah. They, people don’t say, people say they’re lazy. It’s overwhelming. It’s overwhelming. People will say, oh, they’re lazy. They won’t do it. And that’s just not the truth.

I think people would want to if they knew how to do that. I’m certainly the lazy factor that but you hit the easy button. You’re the easy button of easy buttons to hit.

And they’re super competitive and that’s important, right? The ones that want to compete, they’ll win, now that they have the math, that’s the key. If you’re competitive, we’re giving you a new field to compete in.

It’s a brilliant marketing strategies. Give it away. It gets many people on board, gets them excited, have them move into a paid version and then knock on the door of their company and come on guys. We got to get this at the enterprise. That’s just brilliant marketing all the way around.

It’s even better than that because once we sign up enough users, those users are saying, come on guys, we need to automate this. I don’t want to send a survey they’re talking to their company. Yet, we’re not even really having to ask for it in a lot of cases.

That’s brilliant.

They’re pulling their heads of marketing in for us.

What is the capacity? We talked about how you have already had to just put a pause on it because there’s so much activity. If we start seeing so many people run at you, I’ve got to ask the capacity question.

Yeah, we’ve tested it at 100,000 simultaneous logins, all everybody in the platform and it’s still under 0.2 milliseconds or something on its response time. And we’ve got auto scale. We have a really deep partnership with Google. Google has paid to move us to Google cloud and we’re working with Google on a couple of case studies and constantly integrating new Google features. We got very lucky and Google, the folks that we’re working with on 6 different teams at Google. They really like you they loved what they saw, and they felt like it was very Google, right? People said this feels like us the way that you’re collecting data and adding value and even the UIs and so yeah, we are able to handle a lot of people and we have auto scale built so that as the volume goes up, our servers automatically scale to handle the volume.

We’re having such phenomenal success with the listeners growth and listenership, it’s just exploding, and I know we have realtors listening, builders listening, even people outside of the industry. That are listening to this. You talked about that. This is now available for many vertical markets, for many industries, for many individuals, what, another way to say that for people to understand vertical market, what I mean by that it’s for those that have a profile that are interested in using this and they may be a doctor, a lawyer, or doing something even

Or a housekeeper or an influencer people need to have access. It’s becoming a level playing field now, it’s a level playing field. If you’re a professional and you want to win, even if the vertical isn’t launched, create a profile and add yourself, anyone can get in right now. So, you don’t have to wait for us to release the vertical, right? There was a restaurant that claimed a professional profile, a restaurant claimed a professional profile and upgraded, and they’re now winning best margarita inn best chimichanga inn and they hacked, we have to figure out what we’re going to do with the location based folks that, that claim, cause it’s fine and refer the best professional right now.

But yeah, if you want in, no matter what your vertical, just create your profile and make sure you pick the right vertical from Google’s dropdown list that we’ve integrated.

Folks, our listeners, I’m going to tell you right now, I am signing up for this and I’m a consultant and I’m a coach, executive coach, so I’m going to be signing up and using this myself. It’s that powerful. Scott’s so exciting. can’t wait to get this out and share this with our listeners because this could be such a game changer for them.

Yeah, no, Dave, I really appreciate it. Whether you upgrade or not. That’s not what this is about. Get in there, learn math. So, you can compete.

With those watching the video. You already see what the logo area, the URL is Experience.com. For those listening, it is just so easy experience.com go sign up. Is there a way to navigate? Do they need to navigate to a different place? Once they go into experience.com.

Where do they need to go search and just look for themselves? They can say they can click create an account if they can’t find themselves and just walk them through it. And as soon as you create an account very shortly thereafter, hopefully we can keep up with it, but very shortly thereafter, you should get a call from a search rank coach.

That’s awesome. I’m signing up right now myself. I can’t wait. Appreciate it.

Actually, we should talk about that. We’re launching all influencers, we’re launching speakers, influencers, and consultants into a vertical next quarter. So, we’re I’m in leaning into making sure because the fields are a little different. Some of the mappings a little different. Some of the outcomes are a little different. We need to map to those review platforms and so that’s we’re focused on that too and so we’re going to be launching influencers. So that we can manage because managing the internet for each vertical is a little different though.

I’m excited to share this out with everybody. Hopefully we’re going to get a chance to be, I want to be the first mover advantage of my vertical. Thank you so much, Scott, for being here. Appreciate it so much, Friend. Thank you.

Appreciate it, man.

Important Links

• Experience.com website
• LinkedIn – Scott Harris

Scott Harris is a CEO, keynote speaker, and author of “Create WOW Customer Experiences: CX 2.0”. In 2015, Scott capitalized on his 25 years of technology experience in real estate, mortgage and marketing to launch SocialSurvey, a fully automated Customer Experience Platform.

The company was rebranded in 2021 to Experience.com to coincide with the release of a totally new and vastly more powerful CX platform that empowers businesses to put Customer and Employee Experience in motion to drive real-time business outcomes. Sharing what he knows as a leader, speaker and author fuels his desire to keep growing and help companies get better.

In 2024 Experience.com rolled out 20 million profiles for professionals in verticals such as financial services, law, medicine and personal services. Experience.com is now the place to go to find and refer the best professionals.

If you ask Scott what he does, he will likely describe himself as a “Dad” and as his company’s “Chief Storyteller.” Whether at home with his children and grandchild, or at work with a growing family of employees, he tries to bring passion, joy and direction into the lives of everyone around him.