Being a plumbing business owner is all about promptness and a job well done. Does your plumbing website live up to that standard? Even the most beautifully written and designed website means nothing without great SEO.
Learning how to incorporate SEO into our digital marketing strategy means learning to balance SEO and web design with serving customers, which can be overwhelming if you don’t know anything about the Google algorithm for search results.
What Do You Need To Balance When Doing SEO?
This blog post will answer that question to help you create an optimized website to rank higher on search engines like Google.
Working with SEO for plumbers services who fully understand your line of work is the best way to maximize your chances of gaining more traffic, leads, and conversions. Our team at Relentless Digital is here to help with the balancing act of SEO — we’re a digital marketing company that specializes in contractor and plumber websites.
What Is SEO?
Search engine optimization (SEO) works by streamlining a website’s content to appear in the top search engine results. When potential customers search for “plumber near me,” they’re not likely to click past the first page of hits.
Like most tradespeople, plumbers are hardly in short supply. While this is great for the industry, it’s not so great when trying to move to the head of the pack.
Marketing strategies that include SEO help you stand out by using the right keywords to help potential customers who need your services find your website.
Why SEO Still Matters
Your business is a brand. Whether you’re a team or an operation of one, people want to know your values and why they should trust you with their hard-earned money.
Search engine optimization incorporates proven strategies into your web content by staying on trend with the right balance of keywords to maximize online visibility.
Some may shy away from SEO, especially if they think on-page SEO is a one-and-done solution. Others wrongly believe creating high-quality content is enough, or that SEO is old news in today’s internet.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Not only is SEO still relevant, it’s more important than ever for the following reasons.
Search Engines Are the Go-To Information Source for Internet Users
People search on the internet 24/7. Google alone handles 99,000 search queries every second. That’s 8.5 billion searches per day.
If even five of those searches are a match for your services, you’re missing out on more traffic.
SEO Deepens Your Digital Footprint
Anyone can slap together a few paragraphs about their business and call it a day. In that case, one of two things will happen: No one will read it because your website never shows up on the first (or even the tenth) search result page, or those who do read it will see how little effort you put into it and move on to a competitor.
SEO makes quality content come alive by engaging your target audience.
Keywords Make All the Difference
Overloading your content with terms (keyword stuffing) does more harm than good. Inexperienced copywriters treat keywords like a formal checklist without considering their relevance and placement.
Using on-topic keywords naturally can do wonders for your website’s visibility.
Understanding the value of sound SEO is one thing; implementing it is something else entirely. Only the right balance can maximize your plumbing business’s potential.
How To Balance Your SEO Efforts in Six Steps
Before getting into the nitty gritty, there’s one preliminary task you cannot skip: determining your domain authority (DA), which measures your relevance by taking into account your backlinks (we’ll talk more about these later).
DA can make or break your chances of ranking higher on Google. For example, if your top competitor has a DA of 70 out of 100, while your plumbing business only clocks in at 10, you might as well be invisible.
Knowing your DA score will help you streamline your SEO efforts. Anything above 50 is hot; anything below 20 is not.
DA isn’t necessarily a reflection of the quality of your business. Your DA will be low by default if you have just started your business.
In addition to DA, we recommend running a series of audits to help streamline your website:
- A content audit systematically reviews your web content quality, including landing pages, blog posts, and service pages. The audit gives an impartial snapshot of what content to salvage, rework, or eliminate.
- A ranking audit determines the keyword rankings for your website. Sorting these results allows you to see your highest-volume keywords. Those below that standard may be worth including more, whether by creating new content or updating old content to use the right keywords.
- A technical audit is essential to the maintenance of your website. Whereas the first two audits address on-page content-related issues, a technical audit ensures, among other things, that your site structure is optimized to appear on relevant search engine results pages (SERPs). This helps you pinpoint critical errors requiring immediate resolution.
Online tools like Semrush, Ahrefs, and Google Search Console can help with website audits, which you should perform regularly.
Now that you know the importance of domain authority and how to track it, it’s time to answer the question, “What do you need to balance when doing SEO?”
Step 1: Create New Content
New content is vital for anyone looking to boost their SEO. If your website lacks content, it’s time to start creating it. Whether you do this yourself or hire a copywriter, regularly updating your content polishes that all-important badge of authority.
While you’re at it, you’ll want to update your old content to be fully optimized for SEO integration across all pages. You might also discover duplicate content and other loose ends.
Pro tip: The easiest way to give yourself an excuse for creating high-quality content is to add a blog to your website. If you already have one but haven’t written a blog post in a while, change that habit. Talk about the latest trends in your industry.
People coming to your plumbing website may be looking for information before they call you to schedule service. A detailed blog post covering a wide range of relevant topics will up your search engine rankings the more you nourish it with quality keywords.
That way, someone searching for “how to fix a leaking toilet” might initially find their way to a blog post you’ve written on the topic and keep you in mind for future repairs.
Step 2: Understand User Experience
You may be a master of your trade, but do you know how to put together a compelling article that grabs readers’ attention?
Even if writing happens to be within your wheelhouse, maintaining consistent quality across the board takes time you might not have.
Test the website for yourself as if you were your ideal customer. Ask a few friends to do the same and compare notes on your website’s user experience. Do the pages load quickly, and does your content address the problem it promises to solve?
Pro tip: Don’t forget to ensure your website is optimized for desktop and mobile devices. Considering that 92.3% of people access the internet on their mobile phones, a mobile-friendly website is a must.
Understanding how users interact with your site can also help you retain them and understand their buyer personas. If the website load times make you impatient, you can bet your visitors will feel the same.
Step 3: Build Domain Authority
If you already have a ton of engaging content or your domain authority falls under 10, you’ll want to focus far more on building domain authority. While the other steps on this list contribute to DA, you can jumpstart the process in several other ways.
One of the best strategies is to leverage the power of optimized content to draw in organic traffic. You’ll start getting more visitors as you build out and refine your content. You’ll also want to ensure your content is trustworthy.
Pro tip: Get yourself invited as a guest on a plumbing podcast (you might be surprised how many there are!). Doing so will establish your voice in the industry while giving your brand a human touch.
The more your name circulates, the more people will learn to associate it with a plumbing service they can rely on. Conveying a sense of who you are before they click is worth its weight in digital marketing gold.
Step 4: Develop Technical SEO
Let’s say you’ve run a technical audit and found that your website turns up many critical errors, or your website’s ranking audit shows that your keywords aren’t getting enough hits.
In that case, you should devote more attention to your website’s technical aspects.
Technical SEO ensures your awesome content doesn’t get lost in the shuffle, no longer “accessible” to search engines. The inevitable outcome of this is a loss of organic traffic.
Pro tip: Ensure your website has an “https” designation at the front of its URL. The “s” indicates a secure website.
Step 5: Don’t Forget Off-Page SEO and Backlinks
Backlinks are links to your website on other websites. Acquiring backlinks is a surefire way to build credibility. To do this, you must build long-term relationships with industry leaders.
When it comes to backlinking, quality trumps quantity. Still, getting linkbacks to your website from an authoritative source doesn’t happen overnight. Here are some strategies that can help accelerate the process:
Search the web to see whether your business has been mentioned in other outlets. If those mentions are unlinked, contact the owners of those websites and request a backlink. Brand monitoring tools are a big plus here, as they will alert you of any brand mentions on the web in real-time.
Keep tabs on competitor link-building to see who they’ve reached out to. You’ll also gain insight into their digital marketing strategies.
Report broken links on external websites and suggest a link to yours in return for the favor. Webmasters typically appreciate the heads-up, as it helps them improve their domain authority.
Pro tip: In addition to backlinking from authority websites, you want to ensure that all your internal links are functioning correctly. Google penalizes sites for dead internal (and external) links, so weed them out ASAP.
Since backlinks involve other websites, they fall under off-page SEO, which also includes social media marketing and email blasts. It is just as important as on-page optimization.
Step 6: Convert and Maintain Customers
The ultimate goal of SEO is converting leads into clients. If you’re getting 100 organic visitors per month, but none are leading to service calls, you’ve got a problem. It’s pointless to bring more traffic to your site if it doesn’t pique their interest.
Pro tip: Set up a Google My Business (GMB) profile. This lands your business on Google Maps and offers a convenient way for potential customers to see your most up-to-date contact information and hours of operation, read reviews, and get quick directions.
Pay close attention to the keywords that bring people to your website. Are they relevant? If people are finding you through the wrong keywords, then you’re not reaching your target audience. Keyword research is key.
A Note on Balancing Search Engine Optimization
So what do you need to balance when doing SEO?
For some, focusing on new content and social media presence might take the most time and effort. For others, plumbing businesses included, it makes more sense to focus on data analytics and domain authority.
Let’s take the metrics we provided above and provide a breakdown of how much you should be focusing on each:
- Create New Content: 10%
- Understand User Experience: 5%
- Build Domain Authority: 65%
- Develop Technical SEO: 5%
- Off-Page SEO and Backlinks: 5%
- Convert and Maintain Customers: 10%
Play around with these numbers to see what works for you, and treat your SEO campaign as a long-term strategy. Don’t expect new conversions on day one.
And whatever you do, remember that consistency rules the day. You may be killing it on social media platforms, but if you’re only gaining one new customer a month, you might need to balance the off-page SEO with more on-page SEO tactics.
Boost Your SEO Today With IndeedSEO
As a plumber, you strive to excel in your field. But you may not have the time, experience, or human resources to give your website’s SEO the attention it deserves.
At IndeedSEO, we’ve got the tools and know-how to leverage structured data in SEO for all your digital marketing content, keeping you top of mind for the clients you need to reach.
