So you have an excellent local home cleaning, plumbing, or a home relocation company. You’re building your business from scratch. You have set a high-quality standard, have hired the best team, and offer the best services. It looks like you’ve got an excellent recipe for success!
But there’s one thing still missing here — bringing customers to you.
While you can rely on offline marketing and word-of-mouth referrals, there’s still a vastly untapped market — the online users.
Many people resort to online searches to quickly find a good home service business. But when you don’t have a significant online presence, you’re losing out on hundreds of customers!
And working on local SEO is an affordable and effective way of getting these customers to know about your business.
Home Services Businesses: 10 Local SEO Tactics to Get More Customers
Every day, more people are using online searches to find local businesses. In fact, in a recent survey by Visual Objects, it’s found that 76% of people search companies online before an in-person visit. Or, in some cases, hire them to do a job.
Imagine the vast group of audiences you can reach online through local SEO!
With that in mind, let’s look at the top local SEO strategies you can implement for home service businesses to reach more customers online.
1. Set Up a Google My Business Account
Let’s say that you have a home cleaning services business in San Antonio. When someone needs your service, they go to Google and type in ‘home cleaning in San Antonio.’
Google then gives them a list of businesses offering these services along with several other details and a quick way to contact them. You can also get your business listed here for free with a Google My Business (GMB) account.
Your GMB account should have all details about your business — your services, address, contact information, customer reviews, images, videos, posts, and common questions & answers. This makes it easier for people to get all the details and book you quickly.
Sometimes, there can be GMB profiles created for your business already. If that’s the case, you can directly claim your GMB profile and customize it with your details.
Make sure to add as many details as possible about your business that a typical customer will ask. For example, as a home cleaning business, you need to list all the cleaning services you offer — such as deep cleaning, standard cleaning, home relocation cleaning, carpet cleaning, etc.
Make sure your GMB profile is as thorough as possible so that people can get all the information they need easily and make a decision.
2. Optimize for Local Keywords
Local keywords are simply the searches your target customers would type in — like ‘air conditioning services near me,’ ‘house renovation services in San Antonio,’ etc. And adding these keywords as a part of your content is one of the main strategies in local SEO.
Once you have a GMB listing and a website, it’s essential to optimize your content with these local keywords. Local keywords are mostly location-specific phrases about your business. Therefore, including them in your existing content will increase your chances of ranking high on Google searches.
You need to include the local keywords:
- Within the description of your GMB profile
- Within the content on the landing pages of your website
- In the title tags and meta descriptions of all web pages
- In the new blogs and pages, you create for the website
This single strategy of optimizing your GMB profile and website with local keywords would hugely impact your leads and sales.
3. Create Location-Specific Pages
When your home service business is local to one area, you need a landing page — something that’s optimized for the location.
If you cater to more than one location, you can create multiple location pages with high-quality content and relevant information for customers to reach out to you. This page should have:
- Your services
- Testimonials
- Offers/promotions
- Contact information/Quick online booking page
- Availability
4. Get Reviews from Your Customers
Reviews and ratings are among the first few things a person looks at when they land on a GMB listing. And they can make or break your business.
When your customers are satisfied with your job and thank you for it, steal that moment and ask them to leave a review. Google encourages businesses to ask their customers to leave reviews on their GMB profiles. So the next time you’ve completed a job, politely ask your customer to leave a review of your service.
You should also keep an eye on the average ratings on your GMB profile. More than 30% of people filter businesses with 4-star ratings and above, and more than 20% of people filter 3-star ratings and above, according to a 2021 ReviewTrackers report.
The more good ratings and reviews you earn, the more opportunities you open up for your business.
5. Optimize for Voice Searches
Ever since Siri and Alexa were created, more and more people are starting to use search engines using voice search. And if you notice carefully, the way we type in the Google search bar and speak are different.
So as you’re optimizing your GMB profile and creating content for your website, make sure to optimize it for voice searches too.
6. Build Local SEO Links
If you ask any SEO expert about the top things to improve your website, link building would be among the top 5 strategies.
Link building is about getting other reliable websites to link back to you. How can you make this happen?
By creating valuable content that’s worth linking back.
You can publish informative, location-specific blogs related to your home service business that’s useful for your customers. This can help get more link backs to your website, which helps with your Google ranking.
7. Work on the On-Page SEO
The on-page SEO elements are more than just the keywords. It includes your loading speed of the website, the clear heading tags, meta descriptions, alt texts, URL structure, website design, and a lot more.
This on-page SEO has a lot of influence on your Google rankings and can also impact your user experience.
8. Optimize for Mobile Users
Many of us are using smartphones to do quick online searches. Plus, 60% of smartphone users have contacted a business directly using the search results like the ‘click to call’ feature, according to Think with Google.
So your website, as well as your GMB profile, should be optimized for small screens or smartphones. You need to make your web design easy to see and operate for your website, even on a smartphone. For your GMB profile, you need to break down your description text into smaller chunks and bullet points for easy readability.
9. Create Content Based on Your Location
Once you have a solid website, you need to keep adding relevant content to improve its SEO-worthiness. But adding any type of content isn’t going to make the cut.
You need to add content that’s specific to your business as well as your locality. For example, you can focus on the seasonality or the local holidays in your area and write blog posts around it. You can share educational and informative content designed for your local audience to get them interested in your service offerings.
10. List Your Website in Online Directories
Similar to the GMB, listing on other online directories can also bring you new customers — and work on improving your SEO.
You can list your industry-specific directories or common ones like Yelp, Foursquare, and YellowPages. Most of these directories are free to list. And as always, make sure to provide as much information as you can to your customers through these online profiles.
Wrapping Up
These are just a few but essential strategies that you can implement for local SEO. By combining these strategies listed above, you can reach out to more of your customers and scale your business.
