How SEO can help to boost your business

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is an important tool for any trade business, helping you get more visibility online, receive more relevant leads and attract more customers. Nick Jolliffe from Trades Get Online explains how effective SEO can improve your online visibility.

You may know that SEO is a way of helping your website show up higher in search engine results, but how is this done? Basically, it’s about doing such things as building trust with customers, making content that people want to read, using directories to get more people to your website, and researching what words people are typing into search engines. Doing these things makes your website more likely to appear in the top results of popular search engines such as Google or Bing.

For plumbing and heating businesses, it means ensuring your website has relevant content, is easy to navigate, and contains words and phrases relating to plumbing services. The words and phrases you use on your website and in accompanying adverts that appear on Google are called keywords. Using relevant keywords indicates that your website is one that Google needs to pay attention to as it matches what people are searching for online and answers their query quickly and accurately.

Through keyword research and competitor analysis, trade businesses can better understand how customers search for services related to their business, as well as identify potential areas of opportunity. Having engaging content tailored to your target market will help make your website more attractive to potential customers.

If you’re a plumber looking to get more potential customers to visit your website, there are some simple steps you can take to optimise it and make sure the right people find your services.

Google Search Console

Submitting your website to Google Search Console provides valuable insights about how your website ranks online. In other words, how high up it appears in the search results. It also provides tools to help you understand how Google views your website, and to identify and fix any potential issues that may be limiting your website’s visibility in the search results. An important part of submitting your website to Google is your sitemap. A sitemap is an outline of the pages of a website in a format that is easily read by search engines.

Google Business Profile

Create a Google Business profile so customers can easily find you online. By listing the services you offer, adding photos, requesting reviews from your happy customers, and posting content on your profile of jobs you have completed, you can get more local exposure for your business.

You can also use Google’s monitoring tools to track your profile’s performance, so you know how successful it is in bringing customers to your website. Submitting listings on local directories and other websites will also ensure customers can find you easily online and they will normally provide a backlink to your website.

Speed matters!

Customers will only stick around if your website loads quickly. Google knows this, so they use it as a ranking factor. Make sure you prioritise loading time for an optimal user experience.

So don’t use a cheap hosting provider as these will often host hundreds or even thousands of websites on the same server, meaning they can’t respond quickly enough to your users. Make sure any images used are the right size for your site, because the larger they are the longer they will take to load.

Also, make sure your site isn’t too complicated because the more you have on the pages, the more code needs to be loaded.

List your services clearly

Having dedicated pages for each service your business offers helps customers quickly find the information they need and makes it easier for search engines to index your site.

Each service you offer is essentially a keyword, so having separate pages for each service means search engine bots can crawl your pages and have a better understanding of the services you offer. In addition, having individualised content on each page helps optimise keyword usage, which in turn helps boost your website’s organic ranking.

Create a blog

Provide valuable information and stay up to date with your customers’ interests by creating blog content that’s relevant to your business. By producing content about problems your potential customer might have, you can ensure your website content is visible and useful for those who need it most.

You want readers to come away from your blog posts feeling informed and knowledgeable about plumbing-related issues, so make sure you provide helpful information tailored to their needs. Doing this will increase your brand awareness and be at the top of the user’s mind when they need your services. They also build the authority of your site online, increasing the chances your site will show for the services you offer.

Headings and titles

Optimising the technical things like headings, title, and meta tags of your service pages help customers find what they’re looking for quickly and easily, while also boosting your website’s appearances in search results.

Heading tags are HTML elements used to identify headings and subheadings on a web page. They range from <h1> to <h6>, with <h1> being the most important. Title tags are used to specify the title of a web page, and are displayed in search engine results. Meta tags are text snippets describing a web page’s content. They are used to provide search engines with additional information about the page’s content.

Measure results

SEO is an ongoing process, so it’s important to measure the progress of your efforts.

Key metrics include tracking organic website traffic, your site’s keywords, backlinks, and assessing how popular your website is in your local area. Tracking these metrics on a regular basis will enable you to adjust your strategy as needed to improve your SEO performance over time.

You can track your website’s visitors for free with Google Analytics, and Google Search Console provides data on how well your site is performing in search results, but you will need to pay for a paid SEO tool to do more advanced SEO like rank tracking, keyword research, competitor and backlink analysis.

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About The Author

Nick Jolliffe is an experienced digital marketer who has worked with the trade industry for over 20 years. He is the co-founder and director of Lion Spirit Media, a digital marketing agency specialising in digital marketing for trades, and Trades Get Online, a service developed to help tradespeople build their online presence. Nick has a passion for helping tradespeople to make the most of digital marketing.