Many home service companies face stiff competition within their market from other businesses seeking to attract customers for similar service offerings. One important way providers can stand out from their competitors is by establishing a strong online presence. Maximizing SEO helps drive organic traffic, increase a website’s domain authority, and attract customers.
Tom Demers recently wrote about how home service companies can grow their online visibility by using these six SEO tactics:
Cost pages
One popular practice to increase local SEO is to create a town and service page to target a core customer audience in your market and surrounding areas. These pages help reach and educate potential customers about your services and drive relevant traffic.
They can be created featuring proprietary data related to your service and include detailed cost charts. You can include information such as financing options, factors like material or labor that impacts final expenses, and a “questions to ask” section about the cost of a service.
Calculators
Building a cost calculator is a way of pulling in cost-related and calculator searches, as well as increasing engagement and links to the domain. When creating a cost calculator, it is important to answer the questions your customers will most frequently ask when it comes to all costs of services. Being comprehensive will enable you to stand out and be able to generate links and shares.
While cost is the most important calculator feature, include other options such as materials calculators, tools for determining measurements, and value calculators, which show how much a customer can save. AI tools can help develop a cost calculator.
“Best of” lists
A site’s homepage and its location + service page may already rank for queries on a service within the market. Landing on local “best of” lists for your services on third-party sites like Angi can also capture customers searching for local services. One potential downside is being listed among your competitors, which some businesses try to avoid. However, the listing does provide an opportunity to highlight your points of differentiation and stand out from the crowd.
Topically relevant informational content
Many customers may do a search related to home services needs or ways to fix a problem. Creating content based on your core competencies and services with informational advice is another way to attract organic traffic to your site. Providing helpful information can position your voice as an authority on the topic, increase engagement, and potentially attract customers. This content can be shared via social media and can be included in a remarketing audience for paid channels.
Local link building
Link building is a foundation for any SEO strategy, even for local businesses. Home service companies use traditional link-building strategies like guest posting, niche edits, and digital PR, and it can be effective when executed properly. Local businesses can seek coverage on area news sites and request links back from those sites. Links from businesses, event websites, and local publications are extremely valuable. Adding as many links as possible will help gain traction over your competitors among local SEO.
On-page and anchor text optimization
The goal is to optimize meta titles, build smart internal links, and mark up content where appropriate. One challenge with home services and local SEO is using aggressive anchor text and “over-optimization,” which is cramming your target keyword and close variations too aggressively. This often comes with less experienced practitioners used by small businesses who tend to use keywords too frequently, which can look spammy and manipulative.
The same can be true with anchor text from external links. Home service companies need to understand where SEO vendors are getting their links and make sure they are deliberate in how they are using these sources to link to their site.
Home service queries can be extremely valuable, and companies that leverage local SEO best practices can attract customers and optimize their business.
The full article can be found here.
