Today, the internet is the main way we find information on almost any business and the goods or services we seek. Of course, plumbing is no exception. As such, any plumber who is serious about their business should have great web design already; one that showcases their skills and expertise and makes it easy for prospects to get in touch. Nonetheless, a great website won’t do you any good if no one is finding it. This is why your plumbing company needs to understand and embrace digital marketing, specifically your SEO efforts. This guide will put you in the right direction to increase your SEO ranking, website traffic, and ultimately get new customers.
When a potential customer is looking up for a plumber online, the first thing they’re probably going to do is search for the available plumbers and plumbing companies near them. SEO marketing ensures that your business appears among the first few results for the audience you intend to reach.
The main purpose of this guide is to introduce you to SEO for plumbers and plumbing businesses and walk you through how you can improve and maintain your search rankings.
Search engine optimization (SEO) encompasses all the activities and tactics aimed at ranking a website to the top positions of search engine results pages (SERPs). In the world of digital marketing search engines have a major role in providing users with the best results, including goods and services. It is a very important part of any long-term marketing strategy.
Overall, websites that rank at the top of the search engine results for particular sets of keywords will naturally get the most visits, as well as links from other websites. The main purpose of SEO is to make your plumbing business website show up closer to the top of search results when potential customers are looking for a plumber, ultimately resulting in more phone calls and more high-value customers.
Think of the last time you looked up something online. You probably entered a word/phrase into Google or another search engine…why? Well, most likely because you trust it to give you the results that you were looking for. Everyone uses the internet in a similar way all the time , but very few people stop to think about how these search engines organize (index) the content and websites that show up in the SERPs.
Search engine optimization is a long-term marketing strategy , meaning that in order to see the results that you seek, you have to commit to a sustainable and dynamic digital marketing plan. Developing a solid SEO strategy for your plumbing business involves:
Keywords and phrases pertaining the plumbing industry are vital, as they help inform the search engines what your website is all about, and thereby make it easy for them to connect the users with your business. Using long-tail keywords that are most relevant to your niche in the industry gives you a better chance of being at the top of the SERPs.
If a user visits your site and finds it difficult to find the information they were looking for, they will most likely look elsewhere. Keep in mind that customers with plumbing problems won’t spend much time trying to peruse your site, especially if it’s an emergency. Plus, search engines track the amount of time people are spending on each page on your site and how often they click the “back” button, all of which affect SEO performance. This is known as your Bounce Rate.
For search engines to index your site properly, it must contain coherent content, headers, title tags, images, and meta attributions. All these will be used by the search engines to place your site in a relevant position. So, without them, your site wouldn’t appear in the SERPs, no matter how great it is. Your site must be easy for the Google search bots to read and understand so they know when and how to show your results over another.
When a user enters a keyword into Google, its crawlers review thousands of sites at astonishing speeds. And when it encounters a backlink to your site, it will examine the page well. If the page that links to your site is from an authoritative, high-quality website, it’s a sign that you have trustworthy content and it will improve your SERP rankings. For your local search, you will need to ensure that you are accurately placed in the proper directories and have an appropriate amount of NAP citations, or Name, Address, and Phone number. Backlinks are absolutely vital that you have and that you have correctly. Link building is one of the areas of SEO that can have major gains but can also cause major losses if done incorrectly.
To appear close to the top of SERPs, content is critical. Search engines tend to favor sites with original, relevant, and useful content. Well-researched, solid content that is updated regularly and happens to include the right keyword will not only improve your search rankings but also help keep your potential client engaged. This is actually much easier than most people think.
These are just a few items that you could write about that would bring website traffic to your local business. Yes a lot of this content may exist in other places, but it will never have your unique spin on it, and it especially will not typically be specific to your local area. That is the key. You can use this to build credibility and authority in both the eyes of your potential customers and Google as well.
Effective plumbing SEO focuses on the architecture and structure of your plumbing website, its link profile, and the content on its pages. It essentially maximizes the user experience from the point they click on your site from the search results to when they make a purchase or call you for their plumbing jobs. The best way to develop your SEO strategy is to first conduct an internet marketing analysis for your plumbing website. Most plumber SEO experts and plumber SEO services can provide you with a Website SEO Audit that will go over your SEO efforts to date and show you things that can be fixed easily free of charge. Simple changes such as improving your relevant keyword distribution, updating your title tag, improving your local SEO footprint, or tracking your keyword rankings. This will give you a good roadmap of things that you as a business owner can do with or without the help of an SEO expert, or SEO company.
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The first thing that you want to do before launching your SEO campaign is analyzing the navigability of your plumbing website. As mentioned earlier, when a website is easy to use and navigate, the users stay engaged, which improves the overall SEO.
If any of your links produce a 400 error, lead to a blank page, or end up in a dead-end, it will only increase your bounce rate, which can potentially harm your SEO. It also is just not a good experience for your users.
Your site should make sense to the visitors. A good website structure makes it easier for search engine crawlers to analyze your site and helps your users to read more of your content.
There are many different link types, backlinks, internal links, and external links all affect your SEO ranking. Internal links help in navigation, directing users to where they can find additional information. They also direct the crawlers to other locations on your site. Backlinks are often taken as a sign that you provide high-quality information, while external links signal that your content is well-researched.
Overall, your content should be both comprehensive and concise. As a rule of thumb, include as much information as needed when tackling a topic, as it signals the search engine that the content is more likely to contain the information that the user is looking for.
A good way of looking at this is considering what you’d want to find on a plumbing page if you were a customer. What elements would keep you on the site for longer and ultimately lead you to contact the plumbing business?
Now that you know what SEO is all about, let’s look at some of the ways you can use SEO to improve and maintain your search rankings.
In 2018 and beyond, one of the first things you want to do to improve your SEO is getting listed on Google My Business . Google provides such tools to businesses to help them manage their profiles on different Google services. Claiming your Google My Business page and optimizing it gives you a better chance of being found by prospects when they search for plumbing service in your area on both Google Search and Google Maps.
Signing up for it is quite straightforward. While claiming the page, ensure that you enter the correct contact information, address, and other details. Ideally, the information used here should be a match on every other website where your business is listed. Be sure to also add high-quality photos for your business profile.
Making sure that your site has all the essential pages is vital for plumber SEO. You should ideally have a services page that describes what you offer, and this should be easily accessible from your homepage. Moreover, each of your pages should contain plenty of written content complemented with high-quality images and videos where needed. You should also have a contact page, such that it will be easy for your visitor to get in touch with your plumbing company easily if they need to. Again, ensure that the contact information on your site is consistent with what you put on your Google My Business page and other online listings. It’s also a good idea to make the contact page easily accessible from anywhere on the site.
Adding a blog to your site comes with a number of benefits , one of which is making sure the search engines are paying attention to your site. So, as soon as you add a blog to your site, start posting content on it regularly. Another is that blogging allows you to add more pages to your site which ultimately will increase the number of keywords and items that you are able to rank for. As mentioned earlier, this content should be unique, high quality, and helpful to your audience. Your posts should strive to solve a common problem with your audience, or at least provide true value to them. Consider the kind of challenges they might be facing and aim the content at teaching and/or entertaining, and giving them answers.
When crafting the content, you should ensure that it’s well optimized for plumbing SEO and that it targets the most relevant keywords before publishing. Ideally, you should target the keywords that a person in your area who’s ready to find and hire plumbing company immediately is likely to enter on the search engines. So, be sure to include specific keywords such as “plumbing service in Los Angeles”, “electric water heater installation in LA”, “Emergency plumber in LA”, etc. Such local keywords will ensure that you’re getting traffic from your locality rather than from the entire nation or world, and will help you be more competitive when building your local footprint.
To do this yourself can use a variety of tools. They range in price and capability. Ubersuggest is one at the free side of things and provides some good baseline information for your keyword research. Another tool that we use here at Section 5 Media is SEMRush . It also has a free option but most features are unlocked with their paid plans but we have found that the suite of tools that it makes available is well worth the price and is very cost-effective for those that are taking the SEO of their website seriously. You also can rely on a plumber SEO agency to provide the best plumber marketing for your company without the overhead of learning about link building, keyword research, or other local search tactics. You can find your best potential client and provide them with the best plumbing service.
Another effective way of improving your local SEO is online reviews. They help to build your online reputation and get more business in the long run. Think of it as word-of-mouth on the online realm.
Platforms such as Yellow Pages, Google, and Facebook allow users to leave reviews. The key here is to encourage your satisfied customers to leave good reviews for you on these sites. This way, when a prospect searches for plumbing services and sees the good reviews, they will be more likely to hire you as well.
Keep in mind that search engines also consider these reviews when ranking sites. So, if your plumbing business has many positive reviews online, more traffic will be sent your way. In a way, success leads to more success with online review and directory sites so good seo campaign can include real world aspects as well, such as your plumbing company providing outstanding customer service. Every potential customer could be on the line if you get this part of your marketing wrong.
Website authority is important to the search engines and is often rewarded with higher rankings and more organic traffic. Both of these are indispensable when it comes to successful SEO for plumbers. People want to take their business to a firm they can trust, and this can come in form of reviews, recommendations, and a brand that people recognize.
Social media provides a way to build your trust and authority online and helps keeps you relevant in the public eye. So, make sure that you have professional looking profiles on the different social media platforms. This will suggest to your prospects that you have credibility and that you’re available to them. Regularly sharing links to your content and value posts on a schedule on these platforms will help keep your audience engaged, and even bring more business. If you are doing SEO make sure you include Social Media in your strategy, as it is a very important part of a well-rounded plan.
The performance of your website is critical for SEO . One of the best things you can do to your site is to ensure that it’s responsive. Google now gives special preference to websites that load and work well on mobile devices. As such, ensure that your website and all its elements are easy to view on smartphones and other devices.
The load speeds are vital as well. A site that loads slowly risks losing many visitors, as most people expect a website to load in under 2 seconds. Plus, search engines love a fast-loading website. Be sure to also have an SSL certificate (HTTPS), support for AMP, and optimize your meta descriptions, title tags, and image alt tags, for SEO. These little things will really add up in your SEO strategy.
SEO for plumbers doesn’t have to be difficult. It will certainly take some time, work, and patience to get it right. But with the guide above, you can effectively boost your online presence and start getting more organic traffic than you know what to do with. Don’t want to take this all on yourself then we would recommend using our Top Rated SEO Service tailored specifically for your business, location, and growth needs.
Want to have your SEO taken care of by the experts? Contact our team right now for a no-obligation strategy session to discuss how SEO can help your Plumbing business today.
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