Home Services SEO

Lead the Pack with Home Service SEO

Are you ready to rise to the top of search engine rankings and be found by potential clients who need your services right now? Any home services business owner who is interested in experiencing long-term, sustainable business growth needs a unique and highly-effective search engine optimization (SEO) strategy to stand out from the crowd and increase their revenue with qualified leads.

Why Home Service SEO Is So Important

When potential customers were in the market for home services in years past, they would ask their neighbors and friends for recommendations. But these days, they simply pull out their mobile devices and ask Google instead. In fact, 97% of consumers go online to find the local services that are being offered in their area. Here's the problem: if Google isn't recommending your home service provider website in response to local search queries, you have almost no chance of gaining new business, and you'll be stuck in neutral with no way to increase your sales volumes.

SEO for home service contractors is the solution to that problem. Optimizing your site using both on-page SEO and off-page SEO to increase your keyword ranking indicates to Google that your website is a trustworthy, relevant, and authoritative response to users' search queries. Appearing high up in organic search rankings is critically important, because the vast majority of searchers will click on one of the top five results, and less than 1% of searchers will click a link on the second search engine result page (SERP). Whether you’re a big or small business within the home services industry, to reach your business goals, you need online success. An effective local SEO strategy will help you attract the ideal customer to your website and your services.

What Home Service SEO Can Do For Your Company

Have you ever wondered why you don't do much work in your city's most affluent neighborhoods, or why you never seem to get calls from new customers in the smaller towns and suburbs near your main city? It's not a coincidence. You aren't getting those leads because Google doesn't recognize your website as relevant to those areas. By optimizing for search terms specific to the regions you want to target, Digital Shift will indicate to search engines that your services are available there and your site should be recommended on results pages.

To be effective, local SEO for home service contractors requires a combination of:

• Local SEO tactics that get the attention of your target audience in your service area.
• Smart keyword research that identifies the buyer intent keywords used by prospective customers who need your services now and are ready to hire you.
• Compelling content creation for blog posts, service pages, and other content that will convert website visitors into leads with a sound content marketing strategy.
• Creating and posting business listings in online directories to increase organic traffic and online presence.
• Off-page SEO techniques such as link building that will encourage high-quality backlinks from authoritative sites in your industry.
• Social media marketing, including help with optimized posts to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social websites.

Targeted Local SEO

As a home service company, your target audience is residents within your local community. Whereas retail businesses want to target consumers nationally, or even internationally, your business will come from customers within your area. To convert leads, SEO for home service contractors must therefore be optimized locally. Out of all types of SEO marketing for home service companies at your disposal, local SEO has the highest lead conversion by far. Some of the ways that local SEO helps your target audience find your business and choose you for the service they need include by:

• Helping mobile phone users find your business through directories, search engines, and social media platforms.
• Allowing your business to be discoverable on Google Maps, Apple Maps, and other navigational apps.
• Increasing your organic rankings not just on the SERP, but also on the sidebar that displays local map listings through your Google Business Profile.

As you can see, SEO for home service contractors is integral to your business growth. But would you believe that only about half of your competitors actually use local SEO? This means that by using local SEO, you’ll already stand out from around 50 percent of your competitors.

Home Service SEO Keyword Research

Keywords are the words and phrases that people type into the search engine to find relevant searches and results. If Google’s search algorithm detects these keywords in your website, they’ll put your business higher up on the SERP so that the person making the search will be able to find it.

Keyword research is basically what SEO marketing for home service companies is all about, but to be effective, it isn’t as simple as finding the keyword with the highest number of searches. If this were the case, home service SEO wouldn’t need to be done by our talented team at Digital Shift—a software package could do all the heavy lifting for us! In addition to volume, we also look for things like keyword difficulty, or how difficult it will be to get your page to rank on the first page of the search results, and the monetary value of a keyword. High volume keywords with a high difficulty likely won’t get you the results you’re looking for—at least not at first.

Unlike other SEO companies, Digital Shift specializes specifically in SEO for home service contractors. Our SEO experts conduct thorough keyword research to determine what your competitors are ranking for, what prospective customers are searching for, and much more to determine targeted areas of growth for your home service business.

Compelling Content Writing

These days, it just isn’t enough to focus on website and copywriting in your home service SEO plan. Both consumers and Google want quality content that is engaging and informative. You can write about how great your business is until the cows come home, but until you establish a relationship with potential customers through quality content, they don’t have any reason to believe that you’re an authority in your industry. Content writing is therefore integral to building trust and loyalty with your intended audience.

At Digital Shift, we do any type of content writing you can think of, but our most popular content writing services include:

• Location pages
• Local service pages
• And local blog posts

Compared to traditional marketing, content writing costs up to 60 percent less. This SEO for home service contractors strategy has also been shown to generate approximately 3 times the leads as traditional marketing methods. Some additional benefits of our content writing service include:

• Increasing conversion rates through strategically placed calls-to-action (CTA)
• Helping Google’s algorithm identify your website as including high-value content to readers
• Strengthening your reputation as the go-to expert within your industry

Done-For-You Google Business Profile Management

Since it was introduced in 2014, Google Business Profile (previously known as Google My Business) has evolved into a crucial tool for businesses, especially those in the home services sector. It may seem like the type of thing you can set up and then ignore, but that's not an effective home service SEO strategy. To get the most out of it, your Google Business Profile listing needs to be optimized and continually refreshed with new, engaging content, offers, and images.

Customer reviews on your Google Business Profile can make or break your business. According to recent statistics, over 80 percent of people state that they trust the things they read in online reviews just as much as they would trust a recommendation from a close friend or family member. Over half of consumers will only use a business that has a 4-star rating or higher on Google. Additionally, if there is lots of competition in the local area, Google will only display businesses with ratings above 4 stars. Getting lots of positive reviews on your Google Business Profile listing is therefore integral to home service SEO success.

If you're thinking, "I don't have time to fiddle around with my GBP every day," don't worry — Digital Shift offers fully managed Google Business profile services to make your listing one of the most effective SEO marketing for home service companies tools in your portfolio. We'll reply to GBP queries and online reviews by thanking positive reviews for their contribution. If you get a negative review, we'll consult with you on the best way to create a positive outcome for the customer and your home services business. By responding to a negative review in the right way, you can actually use poor customer experiences to your advantage just by showing prospective customers that you know how to handle them.

Strategic Backlinking and Internal Link Building

As a home service company interested in developing a local SEO strategy, you’ve probably heard terms like ‘white-hat’ and ‘black-hat’ SEO techniques. Black-hat SEO efforts can lead to significant growth in visibility initially, but using these methods can damage your business in the long run. Some popular black-hat strategies include:

• Keyword stuffing, or using keywords so many times that Google flags your website as spam
• Purchasing links from low-authority websites
• Generating automatic and scraped content that duplicate the hard work of other content writers and don’t provide readers with any value

These techniques can lead Google to blacklist your website, making it impossible to get found and requiring you to start your home service SEO strategy from scratch.

White-hat home service SEO is essentially SEO techniques that play by the rules. Gains in visibility and traffic made from these methods are won fair and square. Though it takes some time to get the results you want, you can expect more growth in the long run. One of the most effective white-hat SEO for home service contractors is backlinking.

A backlink refers to the highlighted text that you encounter within the text of a blog post or service page that takes you to another website. When other websites—especially popular, highly authoritative sites—link to content on your website, two crucial things happen:

• Your page becomes visible to a new audience and your website traffic increases
• Google recognizes your website as an authority in your industry and ranks it higher up on the SERP

Getting backlinks requires reaching out to higher authority websites and asking them if they’d be willing to backlink to your website, blog post, or service page. This process isn’t for the faint of heart. In the beginning especially, you can expect to have to put a lot of time and effort into outreach, only to receive rejection after rejection. A small business especially may not have the time or resources to spend on outreach. This is where Digital Shift comes in. We have the experience to increase the odds of getting a yes instead of a no, and we’ll keep trying until we’ve increased your backlinks substantially.

In addition to backlinks, our link building service includes adding some internal links within your website content to improve website usability and user experience, encourage viewers who found your site through a backlink to continue exploring, and increase the views on your other pages.

Optimized Social Media Marketing

Effective SEO for home service contractors involves using all the tools at your disposal. Neglecting even just one of these digital channels is a missed opportunity for growth. Some business owners doubt whether SEO marketing for home services companies should include social media marketing. After all, do customers really follow home service providers on these platforms?

You’d be surprised by how much of an impact social media marketing can make on home service contractor SEO. Social media posts allow customers to interact with you more directly than they are able to through your website on its own, which increases engagement. They also build searchable social backlinks to your home service business.

Some of the social media marketing services we offer at Digital Shift include:

• Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, Pinterest, and LinkedIn advertising
• Social media reputation management
• Organic social media marketing
• Paid social media marketing
• And more!

Why Choose Digital Shift for Home Service SEO?

There are a lot of SEO services out there, but we are the digital marketing agency with the most effective strategies for SEO marketing for home service companies. Digital Shift is 100% committed to your success, because our business grows when yours does.

We Don’t Follow Home Service SEO Trends—We Start Them!

Since our founding in 2007, Digital Shift has worked tirelessly to become an industry leader in SEO ranking for home service franchise owners. Since then, we’ve proudly served over 1,000 home service businesses across the United States and Canada. If there’s one thing that’s certain about Google’s algorithms, it’s that they’re constantly changing. An online marketing strategy that works one day may not work the next, and a fantastic SEO agency needs to be on their toes and ready to come up with creative responses to these changes.

Our business success is due to not just being experts in local SEO services, but our ability to anticipate changes and come up with solutions that other SEO companies haven’t thought of so that our clients show up near the top of local online search engines.

Benefits of Working With Digital Shift

• Partner with a dedicated account manager who is also an online SEO marketing for home service companies expert and will collaborate with you for optimal results.
• Have access to a team of experts, including content writers, graphic designers, social media specialists, and home services SEO experts.
• Digital Shift specializes in home service businesses specifically, using strategies we have developed and honed over years of real-life experience.
• Access to transparent marketer reporting that is easy to understand and helps provide a road map for how we can build on previous successes.
• Our services are exclusive in your industry and service area, which means we'll never help your competition at your expense.
• We focus on high-quality service and make ourselves available to you so you can get the support you need.

Frequently Asked Questions About SEO for Home Services Contractors

If you have questions about home services SEO or just want to know more about SEO in general and what Digital Shift can do for your company specifically, give us a call to speak directly with a knowledgeable SEO expert. Or, check out our answers to some common questions below.

How Will You Design My SEO Marketing for Home Service Companies Strategy?

We know your company is unique, and that's why you need a one-of-a-kind strategy tailored to meet your needs. We'll take the time to understand your pain points and ultimate goals for your business, then thoroughly research your local service area and the level of competition there before we come up with a unique approach to SEO that will bring real, paying customers to your door.

How Long Does Home Services SEO Take?

Search engine optimization is a long-term game. It's kind of like swimming upstream — you have to keep paddling, because if you relax, you'll drift right back to where you started. It takes time for search engines to index changes to your site, so it'll likely be about 3-6 months before you start seeing noticeable results. Because the results are cumulative, they'll be even better after 8-12 months and we will continue to build on that success over time.

Is SEO or PPC Better for a Home Service Business?

Both search engine optimization and pay-per-click (PPC) ads can be effective parts of digital marketing services. A PPC ad is a paid advertisement that appears on search engine results pages. Paid ads can be useful tools for raising brand awareness and increasing the online presence of a new website, but PPC can't replace an effective SEO strategy. You can spend thousands of dollars on Google Ads, only to have the benefit dry up as soon as the advertisement stops running, and many search engine users will automatically bypass ads and go straight to organic search results. That's why it's so important to utilize SEO to rank highly in organic results and build sustainable business growth.

Can You Guarantee I'll Rank #1 for Home Services on Google?

No, we can't — and neither can anyone else. Some unethical SEO services will use shady black hat SEO techniques to impress you with big gains early on, but that advantage will quickly disappear, and your site could be penalized or even suspended by Google. No legitimate SEO provider will offer that guarantee to their potential client because there are simply too many rapidly changing factors at play to promise a certain rank on Google. That being said, we are completely confident that we can get you high rankings on search result pages for local targeted keywords and improve your bottom line by bringing in new customers.

What Do You Measure to Determine the Success of a Home Services SEO Campaign?

Your increases in call volumes and sales are the best indicator that our home services marketing efforts are successful. We also look at metrics such as Google Analytics, bounce rate, click-through rate, organic traffic, keyword rankings, conversion rate, backlinks, online visibility, and a number of other factors that help us see what's working for your local business and identify opportunities for improvement.

What Is the Best Home Service SEO Strategy For a Small Business?

If you’re a small business considering investing in home service SEO for the first time, you’re already on your way to experiencing the growth you want. SEO strategy for small businesses and franchises compared to large corporations doesn’t differ significantly. All the SEO strategies discussed above, including link building, keyword research, and content writing are just as effective for a small business as they are for a large one.

At the end of the day, the best SEO strategy for a small business is one that doesn’t just rely on one or two on-page or off-page SEO techniques, but that has a diverse portfolio. Like financial investments, putting a bit into all the different pots rather than gambling on a single strategy has a much greater, if not certain, chance of long-term growth and success.

One of the perks about working with Digital Shift is that we don’t apply the same, standard home service SEO strategy for all of our clients. We take the time to understand your business and your goals, and suggest a home service strategy accordingly.

Can I Do Home Service SEO For My Business Myself?

Anyone can do home service SEO for their business on their own. What everyone can’t do is create an SEO strategy that helps a business grow to its full potential. Our team of SEO experts are highly trained, experienced, and skilled. SEO is all we do, day after day. By working with many different home service companies over the past 15 years, we’ve also gained a thorough understanding of the larger home service industry digital marketing context. We understand not just how to optimize a website with popular keywords, but how our clients’ local SEO strategy compares to their competitors.

At Digital Shift, we also use several leading technologies and software packages to help us collect all the SEO data we can. Most business owners don’t have the time or money to access these tools on their own.

How Much Does Digital Shift’s Home Service SEO Cost?

Because we offer such a wide range of services, we can’t provide cost estimates without meeting with you first. Some of our clients request only a couple pieces of content each month, while others ask for 8 or more pieces on top of Google Business Profile management and social media marketing.

We offer free phone call consultations so that you can get to know who we are and find out whether we’re a good fit for your home service business and your goals. We can also provide a free consultation where we look at your current home service SEO efforts and discuss ways in which you can improve your SEO ranking. Our quotes are free and no-obligation, so you won’t be pressured into partnering with us if you don’t want to—but we think you will!

Rise to the Top of Search Engine Results with Digital Shift's Home Service SEO Marketing Solutions!

Home service providers who want to experience increased revenue and long-term success need the help of a digital marketing company to outrank the competition in their local service area. Digital Shift has a proven strategy for advanced SEO tactics that will accomplish exactly that. You focus on running your business, and we'll focus on getting you new clients through qualified online leads!

Contact us today at 888-380-2260 for a free consultation and no-obligation quote. For more information, you can also check out our case studies to see how we’ve helped home service businesses just like yours earn more backlinks, increase their website traffic, and improve their Google SERP and Google Maps rankings.