Top Local SEO Tips for Home Service Companies
Did you know that 46% of all Google searches are done to seek local information?
Nowadays, using local SEO strategies is essential for your business to find the right customers and grow your company. Keep reading to find out the top local SEO tips for your home service company.
What Is Local SEO?
There is a slight difference between SEO in general and local SEO strategies.
So what's the deal?
The main difference is that search engines will take into account your location when you're searching for local information or local businesses. That means that through local SEO efforts, you can appear both in search engine results and map searches within your functional area.
So, the difference is that you'll focus on showcasing your location throughout your SEO efforts for your business to show up in those geographically specific searches.
Let's dive into the top SEO tips you need to know.
1. Keyword Focus
As with traditional SEO, your focus on keywords is paramount in finding success with your local SEO efforts.
Not only should the location feature in your keywords, but your business should also focus on long-tail keywords.
What does this mean?
Here's the gist of it. Some people may visit Google and type in, 'home service company', but it's more likely that a searcher would use a more extended search term such as, 'home service company in Philadelphia'. If your business is located in Philadelphia, you're going to want to show up in those results.
The same can be said for your products. Perhaps you offer services or products in a specific niche, these should be included in your keyword strategy to rank for these too.
2. On-page SEO Tactics
On-page SEO is all the tactics that are within your control for the SEO of your website. These are things like:
Meta descriptions
Title tags
URL names
Internal linking
Mobile responsiveness
Image and video SEO
Heading tags and alt tags
And the above is still not the complete list!
The thing about on-page SEO is that it can get quite technical, precisely because you have to perform various tasks and tactics on one page and then repeat the process repeatedly for all the pages on your website.
That is when it can be an advantage if you decide to partner with an SEO agency that offers these types of services.
3. Google Local Ads
Even if you feel like paid-for advertising is out of your reach, it isn't!
Local services ads are a Google service that allows you to connect with customers in your operations area. If you want to get seen by the right people who are looking for your services, within your geographical location, it's almost a given that you should be looking at this service.
What local services ads does for you is on a click-by-click basis, so you only pay if someone contacts you directly through the advert itself. It gives you a great 'Google Guaranteed' badge along with your company's ad, which adds a certain level of surety.
Google local services ads even have a bidding system, which means that you can make your budget work for you. And remember, the more traffic you get, the better your SEO efforts will start to work for you.
4. Make Your Content Work
The content you're putting up on your website should not only represent your brand and your business but should also shoot the lights out when it comes to your SEO strategy.
Content should stem directly from your original SEO strategy, which means that the audience you researched and decided on when you started your SEO journey, should still be the audience that you're creating content for.
By creating content that uses the right keywords, along with the correct formatting, and most importantly, the regularity of posting, you'll be creating useful, relevant content for your ideal target audience and also, increasing your search engine rankings.
5. Get Those Reviews
Word-of-mouth marketing is far from dead; it's simply shifted from the man on the street to reviews online. Countless people will research a business or brand online before they decide to make contact.
And guess what the first thing they look at will be?
Your business reviews, of course!
By being responsive to reviews, and engaging with both happy and unhappy customers, you're showing a certain level of reputation management. This means that people will immediately look at your business in a different light!
It shows that you care about how your customer feels, that they're important and that you go the extra mile. Remember, though, that reviews can be left on any platform that your business appears on, from Google to Facebook and just about anywhere else.
The more places your brand appears, the more you need to prioritize your reputation management and make sure that you're on top of all your customer feedback and reviews.
Success With Local SEO
When you're diving into SEO, and this, of course, includes your local SEO efforts too, you need to remember that all your efforts will not give you an overnight change.
SEO is a journey, not a destination. Ensure that you're ready for the commitment to what your business needs to do to keep up your search engine rankings, and be willing to change your strategy if it's called for.
You know, if you're looking for an agency that understands home service companies and what it takes to rank, then look no further, you have found us.
Which is Better For HVAC Marketing? Online or Offline Marketing?
Are you looking to expand your HVAC business to new territories? Perhaps you just started and want to drum up attention in the local community? Whatever your reason, you need a plan, and it starts with knowing the difference between online marketing and offline marketing.
Once you expand your knowledge, you'll be able to decide on an HVAC marketing plan that works. More importantly, you'll know that each one of your marketing dollars will be leading to a high return on investment (ROI).
With this in mind, read on to learn all about HVAC marketing–both online and offline!
Online: HVAC Digital Marketing
Regardless of whether you want to use traditional, offline marketing methods in your strategy, you need to use digital marketing. Online marketing is synonymous with digital marketing. You're using a variety of digital methods in order to build authority with your brand, find new customers, and build your current relationships with customers.
Digital marketing uses a variety of different channels, such as:
- Paid social media advertisements
- Pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns
- Social media posts
- Content marketing (blog posts, video, infographics, etc.)
- And more
You can see how it can quickly become overwhelming if you spread yourself too thin and try to market on all of these channels. However, an HVAC marketing company is here to make the process simple. We'll go over some of the most effective HVAC marketing strategies.
Offline: Traditional Marketing
Compared to online marketing, offline is everything that is now deemed "traditional." Even though they're not as widely used as years past, traditional marketing can still be beneficial for your business, especially if you're trying to build rapport in a local community. Here are a few examples of traditional marketing:
- Billboards
- Newspaper advertisements
- Magazine advertisements
- TV commercials
- Radio ads
- Postcards
- Brochures
- And more
Traditional marketing can be even trickier than digital marketing because you won't get as much real-time feedback on what works and what doesn't. For instance, PPC campaigns will give you instant data on how many people are viewing and clicking on your Google advertisements.
In contrast, you won't be able to tell how many people have viewed your roadside billboard. You would just have to make a conjecture based on how much traffic is on that road. Then, you'd have to manually keep track of how many more calls or website visits you received since the billboard went up. The same is true for print advertisements.
The main benefit of traditional marketing is that you'll stand out from your competitors. A well-designed brochure that includes a discount for the first-time service is more likely to be remembered. This is because your competitors will probably be focusing on digital marketing strategies alone.
HVAC Marketing Ideas: Where to Start
- Increasing brand awareness
- Generating qualified leads
- Increase customer value
- Building brand authority
If you're just getting started with your HVAC business, it helps to focus on building brand awareness before moving on to other goals. You'll find you'll have an easier time generating leads if many people are already familiar with your brand.
Building Brand Awareness
Digital marketing is one of the easiest ways to begin building brand awareness. You can do this by creating a functional and aesthetically pleasing website that people can navigate to in order to learn about your business, schedule appointments, and find contact information. Boosting traffic to your website is done through a combination of PPC advertising and content marketing.
Generating Leads
PPC advertising is another way to quickly generate leads without waiting for your content marketing to "kick in." Search engine optimization (SEO) is important, but it's a long-term strategy. At this point, you can also create brochures and postcards in order to mail to local residents and previous customers.
Increasing Customer Value
Once you begin building brand authority in your local area, you'll begin acquiring paying customers. However, it's important that you keep those customers happy and retain them. You'll find it's far easier and worth more of your energy to retain current customers than to constantly struggle to acquire new ones.
Providing exemplary service and making your scheduling system easier can be great ways to increase customer value. Happy customers will also be more likely to leave positive reviews on your Google Business page and recommend your HVAC business to friends and family.
This can be done through a combination of email marketing and print advertisements to keep customers engaged.
HVAC Marketing: Starting With a Strategy
When it comes to HVAC marketing, it's important to start with a strategy regardless of whether you're going the digital route, traditional, or a combination of the two methods. This is because you can quickly stretch yourself as well as your budget too thin, if you try to do anything and everything all at once.
Marketing the smart way begins with discovering your target audience and learning which marketing channel will capture their attention the most. If your budget allows for it, it is even best to invest in both.
Ready to begin your marketing strategy with a premier full-service marketing agency that's experienced with working with companies in the HVAC industry? Contact us today to get started!
Here's Why You Should Stop Googling Yourself
It seems harmless. You own a business, and you want to find out how your digital marketing efforts are paying off. The next logical step?
Googling yourself, of course! What could go wrong?
As it turns out, quite a bit could go wrong. By searching for yourself online, you make your SEO and ads less effective. It's a total bummer if you’ve just spent half your marketing budget trying to get your rankings up.
Keep reading to find out why you should resist the urge to google yourself and how else you can safely monitor your rankings. The best part? You already know how!
Googling Yourself Is Inaccurate
Whether it’s YouTube videos, social media, or Buzzfeed articles, we’ve all fallen down internet rabbit holes before. You know, the type where a minute of searching on your mobile suddenly turns into a lost hour?
Well, googling yourself is no different. And as an HVAC business owner, you’ve got better things to do than waste your time with one-off, inaccurate Google results that give you no usable information.
At best, you will discover that based on your personal search history and Google's profiling, you’re number one in the rankings. Not that useful if you’re searching from your office PC in the exact location listed on your Google My Business page.
At worst, you’ll not show up at all. And you’ll then spend an hour looking at competitors who seem leaps and bounds ahead of you with their SEO.
It’s important to remember that the rankings you see are NOT the rankings seen by everyone else. Your search results are tailored to you. As a result, googling yourself doesn’t give you the big picture. It just gives you an (often misleading) indicator of your performance based on narrow criteria.
There Are Better Metrics Out There
Thinking that you are googling your business to ‘see how things are going’ is about as sensible as trying to buy pet food from your favorite ice cream place.
To find out how things are going, you need to look at your KPIs. You’ve got access to your analytics dashboard, and your sales performance through your marketing agency who can provide these stats for you. These should be the main indicators of your performance and how well your campaigns are paying off.
Beyond that, tracking your conversion rates, click-through, and inquiry volume will provide data that drills into your success rate. Search isn’t everything. What use is ranking as number one if your lead volume has dropped through the floor?
Rather than being hellbent on securing the top spots, take a holistic view of your digital marketing. Yes, SEO is important for small businesses and will help your ranking. But so is your content strategy and the CTA’s on your site. If in doubt, a professional marketing agency like Optic Marketing Group can make sure you’re looking at the whole picture.
You’re Not the Customer
Ever discovered that you rank for a keyword that you didn’t plan for? It happens! Your prospective customers aren’t always googling the way you expect.
After all, you have years of experience in the field and know all the terminology/jargon inside out. Your prospects, on the other hand, are at the beginning of the journey.
Google estimates that 15% of their search volume is unique. That equates to around 500 million searches a day that Google hasn’t seen before. This means there are going to be new search terms thrown up constantly. Searching for the term, you think your prospects will use is useless. You need actionable insights that will help improve your targeting.
Searching for Yourself Online Has Negative Impacts
One of the worst effects of googling yourself is that you sabotage your online presence by trying to monitor it. Clicking on your PPC ad is the equivalent of emptying your wallet and donating it straight to the search engines. And even if you don’t click, you’re going to create an impression which skews your performance stats.
Plus, when ads appear but aren’t clicked on, they’re shown less overall, and the cost goes up. Meaning fewer genuine prospects will see your ads, and you’ll pay more for the same level of visibility.
The effect on organic rankings is less powerful but still shouldn’t be ignored. Clicking on your website could artificially inflate your visitor numbers. Whilst clicking on competitor links gives Google the nod that these are useful sites, so they’ll rank higher in the future.
Googling Yourself Doesn’t Reveal Your Position in the SERP
Back when Google was just an infant, googling yourself made sense. Their search criteria were simple, and there was less content on the web, so your search position was relatively static no matter who was searching.
Today, it’s a lot more complex. The search engine results take into account many factors to determine which pages you’re shown and when you see certain ads. Your result is different from your boss's result, even if you use the same search query.
Here are some of the factors affecting SERP:
The device you’re using; mobile searches see different results to web searches and so on
Searching with voice assistants like Alexa and Google Home
Your physical location, which is determined by GPS or your devices IP address
Being logged into a Gmail account
Past search history
The search engine used, Google, Yahoo, and Bing, have different algorithms that affect the results you see
Googling yourself won’t reveal which factors are affecting your performance—but using SEO management tools will. With tools like Google Analytics, you can see which devices are used, where your prospects are searching from, and more.
Stop Googling Yourself and Test Your Rankings Professionally
Googling yourself is a fruitless exercise. It won’t reveal much about your position in the rankings, but it could lower your performance. And who would want that?
Get in touch with Optic Marketing Group, your full-service marketing agency today if you want to get a handle on your rankings and stop googling yourself for good!