As a home service contractor, getting more website traffic is likely one of your top marketing priorities. After all, your website is your digital storefront. It is the space where the place where visitors can learn more about your business, see your offerings, and schedule appointments.
In this article, we want to share eight tips that will help you increase your website traffic, generate more leads, and improve your digital marketing ROI.
Let’s get started!
Why Having a Website Is Important
In today’s world, having a strong digital presence is an absolute must for small home service businesses. Otherwise, you are effectively invisible to people in your area searching for home contractor services. However, it is important that you do not depend entirely on third-party platforms (like social media) to build this digital footprint. These platforms are constantly changing their policies, getting acquired, falling out of favor, etc. If they decide to shut down your profile, you are out of luck.
Instead, you want to build an online “home” that YOU control – your website. Your website is a cornerstone of your digital presence that helps you:
- Gather insights about your audience to make informed business decisions
- Improve search engine credibility to further boost your online visibility
- Generate leads, increase conversions, and win more customers
Why Driving Quality Traffic Is a Must
All too often, unscrupulous “marketing experts” will try to push strategies that prioritize driving any and all traffic to your website – regardless of the source. However, this approach of generating website traffic for the sake of having traffic alone won’t help your bottom line. Most of the time, you will find that the site traffic these kinds of tactics generate come either from web bots or are visitors from outside your service area.
As a home service contractor, you need to work on attracting relevant, local website visitors who are most likely to convert into leads and customers. If you experience an increase in website traffic without an associated rise in conversion rates, that is a sign that you are not bringing in the right traffic.
So, let’s look at eight surefire tactics for how you can drive more quality traffic to your website.
How Home Service Contractors Can Increase Website Traffic
1. Optimize Your Google Business Profile
Optimizing your Google Business Profile is an important step for increasing your visibility and driving qualified traffic to your website. An optimized profile helps you to rank on Google Maps and Google Search, so you show up for searches relevant to your business and service area. Furthermore, customers can post reviews on your profile, which gives your presence an additional boost. To optimize your Google listing:
- Make sure to fill out every section available
- Include your business category and specializations
- Include a link to your website
- Add photos of your work
- Keep your business information updated regularly
In fact, if potential customers can find all the information they need on your Google Business Profile, they might forego visiting your website and call you directly!
2. Claim and Manage Your Local Business Directories
It is important to pay attention to local business listings and citations. They play a vital role in driving relevant traffic to your website by building your reputation and improving your local search rankings. They are one of the ways search engines confirm that you are a legitimate business operating in an area of the question for a local search. Consistency is key when it comes to online listings. Make sure your NAP (name, address, and phone number) information is as consistent as possible across all listings. You want this information to match what you entered in your Google Business Profile.
3. Get More Reviews
Online review platforms are another important source of local, relevant traffic. When people are on the hunt for a home service contractor, one of the first places they will look is major third-party review sites like Facebook, Angi, and Nextdoor. If someone likes what they read about a business, they often follow up by visiting their website.
With this in mind, you want to ensure your business has a steady stream of positive reviews on the top review sites for your audience and area. People are much more likely to leave a review when they see that a business actually engages with feedback, so make sure to promptly respond to comments.
4. Be Active and Engaging on Social Media
Building an active community of supporters on social media is a great way to continuously drive traffic to your website. For instance, you can build a Facebook group, Quora Space, or Reddit thread where you answer homeowners’ questions about your industry. Just remember, the goal is to create value for your audience, not to bombard them with self-serving rhetoric when they are seeking help. Focus on creating genuine human engagement.
5. Ensure Your Website Has High Value Content
The more high-value content you offer on your website, the more reasons people will have to visit it. To come up with content that will attract the right visitors to your website, you must first understand your target market – everything from paint points to content preferences.
Use social listening tools to understand how your target audience thinks about home services so that you can provide relevant content. For example, what keywords are they using? What questions do they commonly ask? What are trending topics in home maintenance and repairs? Once you know your audience and their interests, you can create blog posts, videos, and photos that will draw them to your site. Make sure to use interesting, localized, angles to make your post stand out. For instance, explaining why a trending roofing material might not be a good fit for people in your area.
6. Leverage Email Marketing
The more interest your content generates, the better it will rank in search and drive new visitors to your website. A great way to jump-start the process is to use your current readers and customers. Whenever you post a new piece of content to your site, use your email marketing to promote it to your followers/subscribers for a quick traffic boost. In addition to new content, you can engage email subscribers with special offers that include a CTA that sends them to a relevant page on your website.
7. Set Local Targeting Parameters for Your Digital Ads
Another tactic use can use to quickly drive traffic to your website is paid advertising. Just make sure to use local targeting parameters for your ads. This will help ensure that your ads only show to people who live/work within your service area. Otherwise, you will waste money on out of territory clicks that will not do you any good. You can also include local keywords, such as place names, within your ad copy to attract the attention of local viewers.
8. Establish Hyperlocal Signals Across Your Online Presence Through Check-ins
Search engines use signals such as geo-tagged content, reviews, social profile pages, etc., to provide the most relevant results to users conducting a local search. This is where a tool like Surefire Local’s GeoJuice app really comes in handy. It helps increase your visibility in local search by creating the localized content search engines are looking for via geo-tagged check-ins, photos, and videos. Furthermore, it helps you generate more local reviews by sending a text message request while you are face-to-face with your customers.
How Home Service Contractors Can Increase Website Traffic: Recap
There you have it. Eight tactics you can use to help you get more qualified visitors to your website:
- Optimize your Google Business Profile
- Claim and manage your local business directories
- Get more reviews on the top platforms like Google & Facebook
- Be active and engaging on social media
- Ensure your website has high-value content – website copy, blog articles, photos, etc.
- Leverage email marketing to engage prospects and send them to your website with a relevant CTA
- Set local targeting parameters for your digital ads
- Establish hyperlocal signals
However, managing all of these different tactics might feel overwhelming for many home service contractors. This is why we have created the Surefire Local all-in-one marketing platform specifically for the needs of local businesses and service providers. With it, you have all you need to implement the traffic boosting tactics covered above. From a single place, you can respond to reviews, claim business listings, create geo-tagged, manage your digital ads, email campaigns, and more. Schedule a free demo and learn how the Surefire Local can help you take charge of your marketing.
