Digital Marketing For Home Services - A Complete Guide
In order to fuel a growing or even maintaining home services business, good digital marketing needs to be in the picture. In this digital age, having an online presence plays a massive role in the success of any home services business whether it be plumbing, cleaning, landscaping, etc…
Today we will be going into detail on what it takes to create successful digital marketing for home services companies, and how to not only leverage different kinds of traffic but utilize websites and landing pages to create an inbound growth funnel that will outwit your competitors.
- December 28, 2022
Digital Marketing For Home Services - Driving Traffic
When it comes to driving traffic there are two outlets a company can leverage, paid and organic. Paid traffic comes in the form of advertisements, billboards, radio ads, etc… Organic traffic on the other hand comes from directories, guest posting, blogging, and backlinks.
The process of getting and growing organic traffic revolves around the concept of SEO or Search Engine Optimization. However, both methods are a great way to market home services companies online and shouldn’t be ignored when doing digital marketing for home services.
Paid Traffic
Running advertisements is a great way for home services businesses to get traffic and clients early on in their business, or at any time.
We suggest sticking to Google, Facebook, and yelp advertising as radio ads and TV commercials aren’t so good when it comes to getting conversions. Advertisements such as these are much better for building brand awareness, and shouldn’t be used for the average home services company.
When advertising there are six key focuses to maximize the chances of converting clientele:
- Keywords
- Demographics
- Landing Pages
- Ad Copy
- Maximizing Ad Budget
- Expirimentation
Keywords & Demographics
Keywords and demographics work hand and hand to not only drive traffic to home services websites but the right kind of traffic. When performing keyword research we strongly suggest using SEMrush to find keyword search intention, keyword difficulty, and keyword search volume. However, keyword search volume should always be confirmed using Google Trends.
As far as niching down the demographics and keywords, we suggest keeping a close eye on where conversions are coming from. This means focusing on what kinds of people are converting and what keywords are they searching for.
The key to successful advertising is to look past vanity metrics such as CTR and Impressions. Having a 10% CTR means nothing if nobody is converting. If converting users is troublesome even after diligent keyword and demographic research we suggest taking a look at the next four keys to advertising success.
Landing Pages & Ad Copy
As we have already stated, driving all the traffic in the world means nothing if it doesn’t convert, but regardless having a good CTR is still important. That being said, Ad copy is the best way to increase CTR and should be both creative and compelling, to funnel traffic into landing pages where the real magic happens.
Landing pages make or break the ability to convert traffic, and should be a primary focus of advertising. A good landing page needs to be simple yet attractive, have a single CTA, and limit distractions. In fact, removing the menu and footer entirely on landing pages isn’t a bad idea, and is something we experiment with quite often. The landing page(s) should be a separate standalone page that isn’t the homepage. However, having a service page as a landing page is fine as long as there is one clear objective and CTA of the page.
As far as checking the experience and effectiveness of a landing page we have found that the WordPress plugin Reactflow is a great tool to get live video recordings of webpage visitors. From here one can make informed optimizations and adjustments.
Maximizing Ad Budget
This may be one of the most if not the most important keys to successful advertising. So many times we see newly onboarded clientele with advertising campaigns that have zero regards for there budget. Below are some important things to keep in mind when structuring your campaigns.
- Campaigns: 3-5 ad groups
- Ad Groups: 7-10 keywords
- Ads: 1-3 ads per ad group
- Use SKAGs
This structure is a general guide based on a monthly ad spend budget of $1,500-$5,000. However, regardless of budget SKAGs are something that shouldn’t be ignored. SKAGs or Single Keyword Ad Groups are ad groups that focus on driving and converting traffic for one singular keyword. SKAGs are a great tool for any low-budget advertisers, companies looking to outbid larger competitors or keywords that have been performing exceptionally well.
Experimentation
Any advertising agency or employee who says they can have a campaign performing perfectly in less than a month is full of it. Advertising is a game of continuous adaptations and experiments to fuel growth. For this reason, keeping a close eye on demographics, keywords, and visitor experiences is so important for obtaining success.
Once again we suggest using Reactflow or other heatmap plugins to guide optimizations and experiments that result in consistent growth.
Organic Traffic
Organic traffic is a pillar that nearly every successful online company relies on. It is no doubt that SEO is a strategic game of patience and experience but when done right it can be extremely rewarding in both business credibility and revenue.
Organic traffic is the by-product of SEO otherwise known as Search engine optimization. Successful SEO in itself consists of over 200 factors. However, don’t be alarmed SEO can be broken down into three categories, technical SEO, On-page SEO, and Off-page SEO.
Keyword research
Before even considering any SEO categories a bulletproof keyword strategy is needed. A strong keyword strategy helps to guide a company to rank high in Google’s SERPs-Search Engine Result Pages. Not only this but keyword research validates that the chosen keywords are actually marketable search terms.
In other words, that keyword is being actively searched for on Google. It would be horrible to waste months optimizing for keywords that have little or even no traffic potential.
In addition, developing a keyword strategy will help one understand the keyword KD-keyword difficulty of a keyword so it can be decided whether or not that home services business has the time and money to get a ranking for that keyword.
As far as performing keyword research we suggest using a tool like SEMrush to evaluate KD, search volume, and intention of a keyword. However, note that keyword traffic should always be verified by Google trends.
On-page SEO
Once keyword research and strategy are done it’s time to optimize the website’s on-page content. On-page SEO consists of the optimization of all on-page content including but not limited to the following:
- Optimizing Slug URLs
- Optimizing Header Tags
- Optimizing Meta Description For Keywords
- Having Plenty Of Meaningful Internal Links
- Optimizing Image ALT Text
- Having a good keyword density in text
Aside from this, there are a few other things to note. As a best practice, we recommend optimizing each page for only 1 keyword or 2 at the absolute max. The target keyword(s) should appear roughly once per every 100 words of text and should flow nicely into writing.
We understand that this is a lot to keep track of when running a business however using Yoast SEO or outsourcing SEO to a home services SEO agency are two great ways to monitor and optimize on-page SEO.
Technical SEO
Here we are, the most ignored aspect of SEO, and not for a good reason. Technical SEO is very important as it guides Googles Crawlers through content. With poor technical SEO, these crawlers will have trouble understanding content resulting in a poor SEO score from Google which can ultimately hurt rankings. The following are some tasks to complete that help technical SEO performance:
- Fix Crawl Errors
- Switch To HTTPS Over HTTP
- XML Sitemap
- Find & Fix Broken Links
- Backlinks Should Come From High DA-Domain Authority URLs
- Website Speed Optimization
- User Friendly On All Interfaces
A great way to keep track of Home Services’ technical SEO performance is through a paid tool: SEMrush. If the budget is tight, GSC-Google Search Console is a great tool to measure your mobile usability and website crawlability, and the “Ultimate Guide To Eliminating Bad Backlinks” will help for learning about backlinks and how to clean up a backlink profile. As for page speed, we have found that GTMetrix is a reliable tool and provides some great feedback on what can be done to improve to webpage load speed.
Off-page SEO
Off-page SEO is the most expensive, time-draining, and important factor in ranking successfully within Google SERPs. Off-page SEO revolves around any external offsite profiles, backlinks, blog posts, or referrals.
meaningful off-page SEO requires high-quality backlinks and guest posts from authoritative industry leaders. For example, having a backlink plus referral from a blog post on page #1 for the keyword “best home services businesses near me” is a lot more valuable than having a backlink plus referral from a post ranking on page #9 of Google for that keyword.
The way to measure the quality of a backlink or guest post prospect is by analyzing their DA- domain authority and their relative ranking keywords. We recommend that the website has a DA of at least 25 and has a minimum of 200 keywords that match up to the specific home services niche that’s being linked or referred back to. Both of these metrics can be easily analyzed using SEMrush or Ahrefs. As far as finding prospects, we have found that searching the following terms are a good way to source quality candidates:
- "Home Services Guest Posting"
- "Guest Post Home Services"
- "Best Backlinks For Home Services"
- "Best Home Services Directories"
It is important to keep in mind that a good guest post will usually cost around $300-$1,500 and a good backlink insertion will cost around $100-$300. We also recommend leveraging social media and free directories however, make sure links aren’t being spammed as this can significantly hurt organic rankings.
Digital Marketing For Home Services - Website Design
A website can make or break a home services business. As a service-based business, the website is a good place to showcase work (don’t use stock images) and tell customers what the company stands for. Running ads and building a strong SEO campaign is great but if the conversion destination is weak all the traffic being driven to the page is meaningless.
That being said, not just any old website will do. One should aim to keep things simple and mobile friendly especially since the majority of customers are going to be connecting to the business by their phone. We recommend using WordPress as a website’s hosting platform, and Elementor as a website’s design plugin, as they make it easy to optimize a website for all interfaces.
Another important aspect of website design is page speed. Using GTmetrix and the plugin Autoptimize should keep the load speed optimal.
Digital Marketing For Home Services - Key Takeaways
We covered a ton in this blog post and for that reason, we recommend finding some time, after a well-deserved break to come back and reread the post another 1-3 times. This will make sure everything got fully processed.
On that note, developing a home service digital marketing strategy can be quite difficult, especially being new to the game. This is why we have decided to offer a FREE Digital Marketing Plan to any business in need of help.
