When you run a home services business, the importance of localizing your online presence cannot be overstated.
It’s common sense that almost all the new clients you earn from an online marketing campaign will be local clients. If you are an HVAC contractor that operates out of Cleveland, it doesn’t make sense to spend money marketing in ways that will reach people in New York City because they’re simply too far away. Will that campaign expose your brand to those NYC residents? Sure – but that’s not the point of what you’re doing.
For success in the modern era, you need to be strategic with your online marketing and local SEO is how you do it. As you build out those campaigns, you need to have as many optimized images and videos as possible. They go a long way towards helping with customer engagement, which directly impacts a business’s ability to attract and retain local customers.
Research even indicates that articles with images get 94% more views than those without them. That’s the type of statistic that the right visual local SEO strategies for home service contractors can help you take full advantage of.
Understanding the Role of Visuals in Local SEO
As a home services professional, visual content can contribute to local search visibility by giving you the opportunity to show off your ties to the area you work in and are devoted to. If there’s a local event that you participate in, you can put those pictures on your website and cement that you care about those around you. If there are local landmarks, you can put those on your website so people can feel the dedication you have to the area.
Especially for an organization that depends on repeat business like home services, you must always work to establish and maintain a connection between high-quality visuals and a positive customer experience. The more high-quality visuals you have, the more that positive customer experience will cement you as a trusted authority in the community. This is an investment in time, money, and energy that will continue to pay dividends for years to come.
Visual Local SEO Tactics
As you begin to put together visual local SEO strategies for your home services business, remember that there are a number of key areas to explore. Not all of them will make sense for the specific business you’re running, but knowing which options are available to you is the key to making the best decisions possible given whatever it is you’re trying to accomplish.
Website & Blog Optimization Strategies
Always make sure that all images on your website are not only high-resolution, but also relevant at the same time. This includes not just your home page, but your appointment booking page, your “About Us” page, your services pages, and more. Each one is an opportunity to further cement your local ties in a compelling, visual way.
Truly, your entire website design should be both visually appealing and locally relevant. As mentioned, you can incorporate those local landmarks, events, and even notable faces in visual content. Integrate as much local imagery and video content into your blog posts as possible. Create visual content based around not just local stories, but community events.
On the subject of video, always try to leverage videos to enhance storytelling and brand personality whenever you can. Video is the type of content that is said to have the highest ROI by more than half of all marketers, after all.
As you work to create all this content, be sure to optimize both file names and meta descriptions with location-specific keywords. Your users might not be able to see them, but Google can – and all these elements will go a long way towards increasing your search rankings as much as possible.
Directory Listings Optimization Strategies
The good news about going to the effort of creating all that compelling visual content is that you can reuse it again and again. Case in point: directory listings. Upload visually engaging images whenever you can to separate yourself from the other home services businesses that operate in your area.
Showcase everything as visually as you can – from your services to customer support to the quality of skill that you and your team members have to offer. Photos and especially videos are a perfect way to do that.
Keep in mind, however, that you should be as consistent as possible with branding in visual elements across all directories. You don’t want to create confusion among your target audience. Everything you do needs to feel like it’s coming from the exact same place for the best results.
Google Business Profile Optimization Strategies
Your Google Business profile is another opportunity to add a variety of high-quality photos that showcase your business, this time on a channel that will allow you to take advantage of the fact that “Near Me” searches have increased by over 200% in recent years.
Use your home services organization’s Google Business profile as an opportunity to upload videos featuring your business and local events, community leaders, and more.
When your customers have satisfied experiences, encourage them to leave positive reviews whenever they feel it is appropriate. If you can, let them know that it would be very helpful if they included photos in their reviews. This acts as both social proof and another way to visually boost your home services SEO strategy.
Social Media Optimization Strategies
Sites like Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube are tailor-made for visual storytelling. Therefore, you should work to create as many visually appealing posts as you can, all tailored to your local community.
Encourage your customers and the larger members of your community to engage with your home services business whenever possible. Let them know that you’d like them to share photos and videos about your business. Sometimes people are more than willing to do so – they just need a little push in that direction.
Online Advertising Optimization Strategies
When putting together an online advertising strategy for your home services business, be sure to show off your location whenever possible. In addition to using iconography like local landmarks as previously mentioned, lean into local lingo and slang as well. Get as specific as possible with the imagery you use for your ads.
Once you create those ads, run them on all the most popular platforms. That includes but is certainly not limited to ones like Google, Facebook, and others. Pay attention to where the members of your target audience spend the majority of their time and focus your ads on those channels.
Measure and Track Success
If all this sounds like a tremendous amount of effort, that’s because it is. To make sure you’re getting the highest return from that effort, you’ll want to measure and track success moving forward.
When you create visual content, track engagement metrics to make sure that people are actually responding to it in the ways that you want. If they’re not, figure out why and correct those issues. If they are, create similar content as often as possible. Don’t overthink things – it truly doesn’t have to get much more straightforward than that.
Likewise, you should analyze the impact that your visual content has on the larger customer journey you’re asking people to go on. Is your visual content impacting your customers’ behavior? Why or why not? These are all important questions to answer and they’re not ones you’ll be able to carefully examine unless you measure and track success on an ongoing basis.
Always be willing to adjust your visual content strategies based on the data you’re gathering and what you’re observing over time. That way, you’ll be able to make sure that you’re not wasting any of your energy and that every piece of collateral you work hard to create is generating something valuable in return.
Reach a Larger and More Local Audience with Surefire Local
In the end, remember that boosting your online presence through visual marketing is all about a series of small moves that add up to something powerful. Obviously, you need high-resolution, relevant images and videos on your website, as many of them as you can get, in fact. But you also need to go deeper than that.
Leverage videos to enhance your business’ storytelling and brand personality. Get that content into the world through as many channels as possible, including directory listings and your Google Business profile. Social media, online advertising, and more need to come together in a way that lets you track and measure success moving forward.
This is all very time-consuming, yes – but it’s also the type of thing that Surefire Local aims to help organizations like yours with on a daily basis.
Surefire Local is all about helping small businesses establish their online presence by creating as many local signals as possible across various platforms and profiles. This makes it easier for new customers to find you, which ultimately gives your products and services an opportunity to speak for themselves.If you’d like to find out more information about visual SEO strategies for home services contractors, or if you just want to see what type of difference a platform like Surefire Local can make on your larger marketing efforts, please feel free to contact us today or click here to schedule a Surefire Local demo in your area.