One of the most effective ways to market your local plumbing business today is search engine optimization. People are turning to the search engines to find the services that you offer and if your website appears prominently on the search engine results page you will notice a direct correlation with the number of phone calls you receive.
Here are 5 important local SEO tips for plumbers to follow:
Optimize your website using local keywords
SEO is all about keywords. The keywords that people use to search for what you offer must appear on your website pages in order for your website content to appear on the search engine results page. For local search, it’s necessary to localize keywords by inserting the city or town, city or town and state, or neighborhood along with the keyword. For example, instead of simply targeting “plumber” and “plumbing business” you would target “[insert city and state] plumber” and “[insert city and state] plumbing business”.
Verify local listings
Submit your information to the primary search engines, each of which offer free profile listings to local businesses. Basic listings on Google, Bing, and Yahoo! Local are all free and can improve your search presence in your local area. Local listings appear at the top of the page for local search queries. Information should be submitted to additional local directories including yp.com, local.com, and Yelp.
Have a mobile friendly website
More and more people are searching using a mobile device and it’s necessary to cater to this large percentage of potential customers by having a website that can easily be viewed on a mobile device. Your business phone number should be listed on the website using dashes (ex. 555-555-5555) so that a mobile user can click on the number to easily make the call from their mobile device.
Include contact information on every page of the website
You want to make it as easy as possible for the search engine spiders to understand where you are located so that you appear in local search results. Include a physical address and phone number on every page of the website and make sure that this text is crawlable by the search spiders. A good place for this information is the footer of the page.
Optimize social profiles
Optimize your social media profiles in the same way that you would optimize your website by incorporating localized keywords in the titles and descriptions. Social media profiles should appear in search results for branded search terms but can also appear for targeted keywords if optimized properly.