Optimize your local SEO for your home service business.

As a new home or existing business, all you want is to grow your business…the Organic way?

On any given day a person may conduct between three and four searches.  Chances are that one of these searches is to find a nearby restaurant for the day or a specific home service, like repairing the house air conditioning unit, pluming service, or floor installation. 

You name it… the list is endless. But, is your business listed on Google maps? Well, that is the main place most people go to these days to find local businesses. If your local business is not listed on Google maps, well you are missing out.

Main benefits of SEO? 

Driving traffic organically through SEO is one of the main benefits. It’s especially important when small businesses are increasing year after year.  There are currently 30.2 million small businesses in the U.S. accounting for 99.9% of all U.S. business in the country. Implementing a search engine optimization (SEO) strategy that helps your home business be more visible in local search results on Google is key.

Any business that has a physical location or serves a geographic area can benefit from local SEO.  Google my Business is the main component of this strategy.  This tool is a major focal point to increase visibility and awareness in a relatively small geographical area. This will drive website visits, sales, or inquiries, as well as higher levels of foot traffic in any physical location.

How long will SEO Take to show results?

Businesses want to know when they will see the impact of their investment when it comes to SEO.  The main difference is that it’s not like paid media where results can be seen as soon as ads are published. 

It takes time to see SEO success. But how much time? It all depends on how much time it takes to build your SEO and rank in the Google SERP’s. 

That depends on a few key factors, like the website’s history, the competition, and the resources leveraged to produce the desired results. 

There are four main components that need to be worked on to have a proper SEO campaign.

Focus on four main areas for a home service business

Four of the major components to local SEO are, citation building, link building, reputation management, and content.

These techniques are only one segment of the digital marketing strategy.

When a business tries to complete these on its own, it can take up valuable time that should be put toward moving the business forward.  

Let’s take a closer look at each one of these.

Citation building

For local businesses, citation building is an important tool in the SEO space.  Citation building can help improve the search ranking in local searches, an asset for companies who get their business locally.

It is essentially the process of accruing mentions of your business across the web on websites and local directories. 

In other words, having citations on relevant or reputable websites will boost your credibility with Google and increase your search ranking.

It takes a sustained effort to build up quality citations.  It may be a marketer or a customer that makes a reference of your business on Google. They may also reference on their newsfeed about a product or service by creating a link to your business resulting in more visibility. Another example would be listing your business in Yellowpages online or the BBB.

This makes citations a perfect tool to expand your reach in the local market place. 

Link building 

This will in turn boost the website’s authority by using external links to high-authority domains.  These links are essentially “votes” that google takes into consideration when ranking your home service business.

Foundational link building works in the same way by boosting traffic to a company’s website from another website. 

This sends a signal to Google that your site is a quality resource worthy of citation.  Increasing your chances to rank higher in searches. 

Reputation management

In the same way that our personal reputation matters to us, it also takes center stage when owning a home business. A business owner is always diligent about meeting or exceeding customer expectations. 

But, on any given day something may not turn as great as it did the day before for any given customer. This is where reputation management becomes critically important.

Reputation management deals with very sensitive areas, like what a person feels, perceives, and experiences when interacting with your business. 

If your business has experienced some bad reviews, there may be work there to be done to clean up the scene by creating recent positive reviews to help show how the situation has improved and how the negative review was handled since the incident.

In some cases, people who leave negative reviews can be contacted. A lot of times an individual just needs to talk about the “bad” experience to feel better about it. After this is done, they may even take the bad review down or change it to a good one.

Home service businesses not only need to keep up with the daily operations but need to be concerned with building a good reputation through a well-designed marketing strategy consisting of, blogs articles, service pages, Google content pages, and other marketing tactics determined as appropriate by the business owner and their reputation manager.

Content, Content, Content

Just like location is important for any storefront business, when it comes to online business it’s all about the content.

First, let’s take a closer look at blog articles.  There are several factors to take into consideration.

A home business owner has to consider spending some time on creating blogs for their website, by creating content on a regular basis that will attract readership and keep their audience coming back long term.

This will include spending time brainstorming and writing about topics that are relevant to your readers.

Illustrating them with images to keep readers engaged and referencing other high authority websites that support your blog.

If writing is not your specialty, you may want to look into hiring a blog writer for this task. Using good SEO practices is also very important when writing a blog.

Different types of content 

Writing blogs that can lead to a landing page is a good segway into service pages. 

This is a great way to build trust and invite them to take action on a specific offer.

The main goal is to design a page that will convert visitors into leads.  Leads that will want to know more about your company and take them back to your website’s main pages for further exploration.  This involves a certain level of technical expertise, creativity, and strategic planning.

The last tools available to home businesses are Google content pages and geotagging.  With Google content pages a home business wants to make sure their business listing is as accurate and up to date as possible. 

Google is constantly updating its algorithms which directly affects the way listings rank during searches. Including concise business descriptions that are compelling as readers quickly peruse through all the listings is key. Its main objective is to help your business rank number one.

Lastly, geotagging is another smart tool that is helping home businesses crush it when it comes to ranking.  Geotagging helps pin down the exact coordinates of where and when the image was taken. 

Making use of geotagging technology readily available from any iPhone helps boost traffic to a specific location.  The more images associated with your location, the higher your business will rank.  Essentially any local home business owner’s dream come true! 

Looking for an SEO Company

Its best practice to consider partnering with an SEO company that has the technical expertise to plan the best SEO strategy for your own industry-specific home service business. 

When looking for an SEO company a home business will need to make sure that the agency is well acquainted with all these strategies and understands how to implement each one of these tools to create massive growth for a home business. Will your business be next? Will we be your SEO Company?

Want More Customers?

Are you interested in getting so many leads that you will not be able to keep up? Maybe not 26,000… but imagine how 25 qualified prospects in buy mode could change your week.

We invite you to set up a free 30-minute strategy session with us today. 

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