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SEO is not a waste of money but most SEO companies are a waste of money.
At my last job, I sold SEO to small businesses. The company I worked for hired (subcontracted) 3rd party vendors to “run” the SEO for our clients and marked up the subcontractor’s prices by 150%.
90% of the 3rd party vendors they used were complete garbage. Contractors were paying for “10 hours of SEO” and seeing little to no results with little explaination of what the company was doing for those “10 hours” of work.
I didn’t like that and soon left that job.
That situation combined with recent changes to search engines and AI, prompted me to make a short list of things any home services company do to get found online (improve their SEO) without spending a fortune or getting taken advantage of.
The list below is centered around original content. Content has been and will remain one of the top factors that search engines use to rank websites and businesses.
3 things your home service company can do to get found online:
1. Create a video of each service type.
Video title has neighborhood, city, service type, and company name
- Create a video of each type of service your company offers. Doesn’t have to be fancy.
- 1-2 minutes long. Show your team actually doing the work and your process.
- Post the video on YouTube.
- Make sure to add the service location to the video and tag it with the name of the service.
- Put the service type and location in the video title to help show up in local searches.
- Google owns YouTube so Google will surface videos in search results if they feel it is relevant to answering the searcher’s inquiry.
- Post the video on your website.
- You can post the YouTube link to keep loading times fast.
For Paintworks, we made over 100 videos. Some of those videos rank well for SEO. See the YouTube channel landing page here
Bonus: The videos also help sell people. People like to see the process and the visual proof before they hire a company. So it’s a twofold effect = bring traffic and help convert sales.
2. Before and After photos
Before and after pictures and stories rank well online and sell people.
To turn online traffic into leads and customers you need the proof that your company can perform the work effectively.
Before and after images are proof building content. The more proof you provide to the search engines the more chances your company has to be found online.
- Take before and after photos of a project
- Post the before/after photos on your website
- Tag the images with the service name and location (i.e.before replacing brooklyn townhouse roof and after replacing brooklyn townhouse roof)
- Add captions explaining the photos.
- Use the photos on the service webpage and on a blog post.
Before and after photos combined with company certifications, and online reviews makes your website and company look better in the eyes of Google and other search engines.
Bonus: You can reuse the before and after photos for your company’s social media.
3. Project based blog posts
Our clients get some of the best SEO results by simply posting blogs about their projects.
- Use the service type and the location in the header of the blog.
- Write atleast 250-300 words about the project
- Add before and after photos or video.
Each one of these posts can rank and be found in search. Think of it as planting little seeds
Bottom Line
Using the 3 types of content listed above you can create your own organic content and improve your SEO without hiring any professionals. It just takes a camera phone and time.
With enough posts and consistency you can help your company get found online, earn trust, get leads, close deals, help people and grow your business.
Whenever you’re ready, there are 2 ways we can help you:
- Download our Marketing Playbook: A detailed 16-step guide for getting home service businesses from 0 to $2 million+/year in revenue
- Book a call to discuss a partnership to help you grow your business.
