A lot of local service based business often have poorly made websites that underperform in search engines, especially in local search. There is a simple way to fix this by structuring your website to highlight your services/products and target specific suburbs/localities.
More often than not, these websites are often created on an incredibly low budget and thrown together simply to check off ‘having a website’, without any time dedicated to a local search strategy. These websites fall behind, letting their competitors take the lead.
It’s free & effective
You may have been told that money has to be poured into advertising to appear at the top, but when focusing on increasing your local SEO rankings, nothing is more important than your content. Google determines how highly a website ranks for a search key phrase on how much of credible source of it is of relevant information.
Local SEO is especially important for trades and contractors. Ways that can help you increase your rank for your business include the following.
The steps
1. Create a page for each service
It’s likely your business provides a range of services and that you would want to rank on google if someone searched for any of those particular services. An example of this would be a roofing company who not only provides standard roofing services but gutter protection, skylight installation and tile re-spraying.
Rather than simply listing these services off, creating a page for each of them will help to:
- Appear to be more of an expert in your field to visitors
- Show Google that you are knowledgeable in your field of expertise
- Help to show more relevant information to viewers who search for specific services that your business provides
The key is to provide as much content as possible for each service. At least 200 words for each service page with photo examples. As an added bonus, try to include a testimonial from a customer that mentions that service specifically. Try as hard as possible to avoid using duplicate content, each page of your website should have unique content that hasn’t been used before. Google give bonus points for unique content and negatively scores website for duplicate content.
2. Create a page for each suburb
If you want to appear in the search results for as many suburbs as possible, the best course of action is to create a whole page for that suburb. A ‘suburb’ page would for a roofing company would be titled something like ‘Lobethal Roofing Services’ and would contain any content relevant to this suburb. As much content as possible is always the best way to rank for each suburb you want to target.
Example content could be:
- Services you carry out in that suburb (this will likely be duplicate content for each suburb, it is hard to avoid doing otherwise).
- Testimonials from customers in that suburb. Not only does this help to have more unique content for each suburb page but it shows local visitors that people around them have been happy with your services. They may even know the person who left you such a glowing review.
- Photos of jobs completed in the suburb. Visitors to your website from said suburb may recognise the projects shown in the images and remember that the job was done particularly well.
- Any projects from the targeted suburb that have won awards, been featured in magazines etc. should be on the specific suburb page.
- Perhaps a discount or special deal is offered to customers in certain suburbs, possibly due to their proximity to your businesses location. This should be noted on the specific suburb page.
Helpful advice
- It is very important to avoid duplicate content, Google will de-rank your website for trying to cheat the system in any way.
- Use natural language when writing content.
- Try to include keywords, but don’t forsake naturalness and readability (Google will also de-rank for ‘keyword stuffing’).
- An easy way to manage multiple galleries for different suburbs and services would be to use instagram galleries on each page and filter the images based on their hashtags.
- Start collecting content and categorising it now. On your next job, take good photos and ask for a testimonial and keep a record of where it was and what services were completed.
Start today
The sooner you start creating content the better. As you complete jobs, remember to take photos and prompt your customers for testimonials. It’s important to organise the photos and testimonials (and any other content you may get!) into what service they’re relevant to and what suburb they originated from. You’ll thank yourself later if you are organised early!
Leave a comment to discuss your thoughts on local SEO strategies or ask any questions you may have. If you would like us to deploy this strategy on your website, get in touch!
