In this article, you’ll uncover the local SEO mistakes you might commit when marketing your home services company.
Did you know that 76 percent of users performing local searches using their smartphones tended to visit the store related to their search the same day? That’s the power of local search engine optimization services right there.
Even if you have a nationwide or state-wide home service company with multiple branches across different cities, SEO agencies recommend using local SEO services to target specific segments of the market or your prospective customers bit by bit. After all, at least one in every three local searches on Google or Bing can lead to purchases, which means that organic SERP rankings greatly impact your lead generation and conversion rates!
It’s in your best interest to optimize your website or landing page with a call-to-action (CTA) for at least Google and other search engines like Bing and Yahoo.
In previous blogs, we shared tips for successful local SEO for home service businesses. We’ve also revealed powerful local SEO tactics for home service marketing based on our own decades of experience as an SEO company.
In this blog, we’ll discuss the mistakes you might risk committing when using local organic SEO services for home service marketing.
Table of Contents
How to Use Local SEO for Home Services Marketing
Many SEO marketing experts can attest that the right way to do local SEO is more than just adding locations to keywords. It’s also foundational and deals with your web content, design, and overall user experience (UX). The challenge here is that, unlike PPC or paid social home service marketing, the results of organic SERP optimization are only felt later on down the line.
This means that you may have to do a lot of work for some time before you start seeing results. As with many things in life, patience is key.
Although we’ve just said that local SEO is more than just keywords, they still have a tremendous impact on your website’s onsite SEO results. To get a high amount of relevant traffic on your landing page, the most basic thing you can do is to create great content based on the right keywords or key phrases that you’re targeting.
One common mistake that home service providers—and even some amateur SEO agencies—commit is assuming that simply combining their service and their location would already create a great keyword for them to target (for example, “locksmith laguna beach” for locksmithing services in Laguna Beach).
However, that is often not enough. You need to conduct proper keyword research to find out what words people in Laguna Beach most often search for that are related to locksmith services, which may not even be “locksmith”. Maybe it’s “open my door laguna beach”, or “bathroom accidentally locked in laguna”. You wouldn’t know until you do keyword research.
Doing local SEO is not as simple as combining your service and your location and using the result as your target keywords.
Neglectful Local SEO is Harmful Local SEO
A poorly implemented or haphazardly prepared local SEO campaign is, at best, a waste of time and, at worst, can lead to spam penalties from Google or Bing. Professional SEO services can be very helpful in avoiding those.
Negligent practices like keyword stuffing, excessive CTAs, hard-sell tactics, clickbait titles, or typographical errors can all lead to search engines marking your website as spam. You’ve been warned.
Halfhearted SEO implementation often results in nothing changing for your website, so at least it’s no harm, no foul. Or if it does work, you might get disappointing results that you didn’t plan for or project.
Home service startups may benefit more from local SEO than bigger companies because it’s nearly impossible for some mid-sized to small businesses to rank high on generic or general keywords in their industry.
Suppose your home service company is a moving service in Anaheim. You should factor in location and Google’s tendency to auto-locate users to get better rankings for your geographic location. For instance, instead of wasting your time trying to get a high ranking for “hire moving company,” you can get much better results for targeting “fast movers anaheim oc” or something similar.
As you develop your paid social media ads, you must do the same for your local SEO. Your local SEO campaign should involve foundational changes, careful planning, and tracking or analytics to ensure that your website ranks high for relevant keywords that include a local designation.
Expert SEO Means NOT Forgetting On-Page Optimization
SEO specialists also agree that effective local SEO includes on-page optimization. As you pay attention to the elements of PPC advertising for your home service business, do the same with on-page optimization.
On page SEO services involve optimizing your website for Google, Bing, and Yahoo through your header tags, title tags, and meta descriptions. The meta, in particular, is vital since that’s what will be displayed on SERPs.
Neglect of on page SEO services can make it difficult for users to access your website even if you hit all of Google’s search signal requirements. Always optimize with the UX in mind.
The meta tags and descriptions make it easier for search engines to contextualize what your website is all about. Your website will also be less likely to get flagged as spam if you ensure that every nook and cranny of your website is readable and optimized.
If you have no clue how your website is currently doing SEO-wise, you may avail of a comprehensive SEO audit service from an experienced SEO marketing agency like Zero Company.
Do some whitehat SEO as well. Whitehat SEO involves doing things that improve your search rankings while playing by the rules of the search engine (as opposed to blackhat SEO, which involves resorting to actions that violate search engines’ terms of service). To do whitehat SEO, you’ll need to improve your site’s navigation, write great content, add proper titles and keywords, and so on.
To avoid penalties, you may work with an experienced SEO marketing company that has been doing whitehat SEO for many years and can provide you samples of their results.
Don’t Focus Only on Google While Ignoring Other Search Engines
Not every SEO digital marketing agency knows to focus not only on what Google considers as ‘quality’. Although it’s the leading search engine, Google is just one of several options. You should also take into account other kings for web traffic, such as Yahoo and Bing.
So if you have the capacity to do so, do your best so that your onsite SEO ensures that your website is also locally optimized for Yahoo, Bing, and the other search engines. You might discover new market segments or niche audiences from those other search engines your competition is ignoring.
Our experience as a trusted Orange County SEO company offering affordable search engine optimization services taught us that you can even successfully use the exact SEO keywords on Google to optimize for another search engine. You might just have to do a few tweaks and adjustments, but it would still save you a lot of resources.
Refrain from assuming that just because your website is optimized for Google, it’s already good to go with others. For one, Bing focuses on previews, while Yahoo values trusted and relevant websites over content.
Although Google is still king, neglecting other search engines is a waste of untapped traffic and potential.
As an SEO marketing agency, we believe that every website—from social media to video sharing sites—has a search feature of some form that you can optimize your site for using your posts and/or contributions.
Sure, getting traction from Twitter or Facebook search is much easier when you use PPC advertising or social media ads and have a landing page ready to promote your home services.
However, there are ways to do local SEO for your site organically using social media. For example, you may create your own Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, Instagram, or LinkedIn pages by yourself (this part is so easy that you probably won’t need the help of any SEO company doing it).
Your Home Services Company's Ideal SEO Specialist for Local SEO Services
For more complicated local search engine optimization services, you’ll need an experienced SEO digital marketing agency.
Zero Company is an Orange County SEO agency that’s been providing first-rate local SEO services, pay per click advertising services, and other digital marketing services for more than 20 years.
Consult our SEO experts for free today!
