If you’re a service-based business owner, regardless of whether you’re a roofer, HVAC, or handyman, your online presence can have a lot to do with your bottom line. The more visible you are to your potential customers, the more likely they are to call upon you when they need anything from routine maintenance to emergency assistance.
Of course, when the rules of the game keep changing, it’s hard to both establish and keep up with your web presence. Search algorithms, customer preferences, industry demand, content specifications: multiple factors determine not just where you show up in the search but whether the initial search leads to a conversion. If you’re not keeping up with the intricacies behind each change, it can be challenging to get any kind of ROI on your website (let alone optimized ROI). Here, we’ll look at the three key factors to improve your online web presence and how learning the fundamentals can help you anticipate future changes.
1 . Customer Insights: Knowing Your Audience
Your customers are the backbone of your business, so it’s important to cater to their needs both online and off. You’ll need to get into their heads to improve the online presence of your service-based business.
Understanding Customer Behavior
When you know a customer’s budget, needs, location, and preferences, it’s easier to create content that directly addresses their needs. Your homepage won’t start off advertising your most expensive service options when your customers are largely watching their pennies. Your content won’t answer complex questions about your industry when the customer only has a base-level understanding of it.
There are multiple tools available to help you better understand your customers. For example, you might send out a short customer survey to your loyal customers or offer a small discount to new customers who fill out a few simple questions about what they’re looking for and how they ran across your business. You can also use tools like Google Analytics to assess not just the initial traffic to your page but also how long the customer spent on it, what they clicked on, and how many times they returned to it.
It’s worth noting that many of these metrics are gleaned by cookies, a digital asset that is being phased out — albeit rather slowly. This trend should hopefully inspire business owners to do less digital tracking and more direct outreach. While it can be more work to get a customer to volunteer personal information, it’s also the best way to gain long-term loyalty.
Customer Journey Mapping
Do you know exactly how your customers find your business online? Once you know the touchpoints, you can optimize them for better engagement. For example, if the first thing that pops up about your business is your Yelp page, it would make sense to step up your involvement on that page.
This may mean directly responding to complaints or critical comments, whether that’s to make amends with the customer or to professionally detail your side of the story. Or you might post relevant, limited-time offers on your Yelp page to tempt people to click on your website link. When customers often take different paths to reach the same destination, evaluating that journey gives you a better idea of how to prioritize information so their journey is as helpful as possible.
2. Local Search Insights: Enhancing Local Visibility
Your local content strategy determines whether your neighbors see your business when they search for a particular service or need it.
Local SEO Fundamentals
Local search for service-based businesses is critical to build your customer base. If you’re advertising your business to people too far away to realistically call upon you, you’re wasting everyone’s time and money. If you’re not pinpointing your target areas hard enough, you’re liable to miss people who need your services and who will never actually stumble upon your name unless they do a very deep dive.
To do a local SEO audit, you’ll need to assess your keywords, optimization, titles, mobile-friendliness, online citations, backlinks, and competitor analysis. If you’re just getting started in website optimization, you might try searching for your business in an incognito window to see where you fall and then testing out your website from a phone, tablet, laptop, or desktop. If you’re having trouble navigating to different pages or your content is outdated, this can negatively impact your online presence.
2. Optimize Your Google Business Profile
Your Google Business Profile is sometimes the first thing that a customer sees about your business. The more optimized it is, the more likely you’ll end up in the first three listings in a local search result:
- Be Specific: Once you’ve claimed your business, you should be using accurate descriptions to depict who your customers are and where your specialties lie. Use customer data to structure your categories and attributes based on demand.
- Optimize: Use relevant keywords, photos, and videos to help customers get a better sense of whether you’re the right fit for them. Encourage questions from customers and ensure that you’re getting back to them with helpful answers so searchers know that you’re monitoring the traffic.
- Encourage reviews: The more positive reviews you have, the more likely you’ll show up in searches and the more likely a customer will choose you.
You can also leverage assets like Google Maps and local directories for additional visibility. This may mean running ads on different platforms or creating content that highlights what makes you different from the competition.
Better Content
Your blog posts, landing pages, keywords, and phrases should all be specific to your location. This may mean working colloquialisms into your content, even if they’re not strictly correct. For example, you might work in tuckpointing when speaking of repointing if that’s how it’s referenced by customers and then go on to clarify how the two are different services.
3. Content Publishing: Creating Valuable Content
Search algorithms may change, but the underlying drivers are always to create valuable content for the searcher. The more you keep in mind what they’re looking for, as opposed to what you want them to look for, the easier it is to brainstorm and create content for your customers.
Content Strategy Development
Your content should be as consistent as it is valuable. This means blogs, web pages, social media posts, and third-party profiles should all be accurate and on-brand. Ideally, you’ll plan your content around customer pain points and interests.
For example, if your customers tend to call you when their HVAC systems are on their last legs (as opposed to getting yearly maintenance), you might beef up your content on emergency services and integrate friendly reminders as a way to help people avoid excess expense or damage by waiting until the last minute.
Types of Content to Publish
Videos on blogs and web pages remain some of the best ways to really flesh out your services, so customers understand how they can best leverage your skills. For example, you might use a blog to talk about how someone came to you with an unusual request and how your team worked through each step of the project for a successful outcome. Testimonials, how-to guides, and case studies all illustrate how different services are implemented for different customers and what people can expect when they choose you.
Content Distribution
Are your customers on Facebook or Instagram? How about Nextdoor? Do you have a steadily growing email list? These questions have a lot to do with where you promote your content and how many people engage with it.
The good news is that interesting content is always in demand, even if your customers aren’t actively searching for a specific service at the time of distribution. For instance, maybe you have a funny tale of a customer who thought they needed an entire remodel when they really only needed a mini-makeover.
If you’re looking for ways to grow your follower lists, you can offer customers a small incentive in return for their digital pledge, whether that’s a free gift or a small discount, but the best way to maintain your loyalty is to really work on the quality of content, so there’s something worth clicking on every time you post.
Take Action Today
Your online presence is more than just whether your business shows up when a person types in a keyword. It has a lot to do with how customers understand your services, your reputation, and how you ‘fit’ within the larger sector.
Simple things, such as updating your business hours, clarifying your pricing, and responding to reviews, don’t take much time and can noticeably improve where you fall in the search rankings. Of course, if you really want to step up your game, it’s going to take a deeper dive into the content you post and how you distribute it.
If you’re looking for an expert who can help you with all three of these tips, attend a Surefire Local demo to learn more about how to improve your local search rankings for better ROI.