This New Year is a perfect opportunity for a fresh start and new initiatives for your business. You can use many marketing strategies to grow your home improvement business. The key is knowing how to take advantage of these opportunities to help your business reach more homeowners. The answer: investing in an SEO strategy. Here are the four best SEO tactics every business needs to grow.
SEO Tip #1: Content
Content is King is a common phrase in the online marketing industry that also happens to be true. Adding quality content and target keywords to your website increases your rank on search engines. For example, building out pages, such as a contact us, about us, and pricing page expands your reach by giving your website more pages to rank for long-tail keywords in search engines. Long-tail keywords are phrases generally made from three to five words.
To improve your SEO rank, it is critical that your website has useful and valuable content. In other words, can your homeowners easily find your business hours and location(s)? Is there an easily visible estimate request form? Is there a balance between images and text?
Not only does content expand your reach, but quality content also establishes your brand and sets positions your business as an authority in the industry. Homeowners are looking for information, and you can answer their questions through your easy-to-find content. Understand that the more accessible your information is to find, the higher the likelihood that they will reach out to you when they are ready to start a home improvement project.
SEO Tip #2: Usability and Design
In addition to ensuring that your website has good content, it is also essential to make sure that your site is visually appealing and easy to use. Ask yourself whether your audience can navigate seamlessly between pages. Is there a visible call to action (CTA)? Below is an example of Solar Nation’s home page.
Immediately the user’s eyes are drawn to the CTA because the color orange stands out from the rest of the page. Users can also click on the video or seamlessly navigate between the tabs listed on top. Some sites also use icons to reinforce the message with a visual explanation. Search engines love easy-to-use and visually appealing sites because that tells them the page has a great user experience.
Additionally, there is a way to determine if your page has a good user experience. Look at your bounce rate. If you have a low bounce rate, you can infer that users are finding the information on the page useful. The better your user experience is, the higher your traffic will be, and thereby helps the ranking.
SEO Tip #3: Speed
Google and Bing also look at how quickly your pages are loading. Pages that are slow to load hinder the user experience, thus affecting bounce rates. Additionally, high bounce rates indicate that users are not staying very long on a page. Therefore, optimizing page speed for desktop and mobile positively impacts your SEO ranking.
SEO Tip #4: Organize
URL hierarchy is another factor that can influence your search engine ranking. Organize your site with keywords in the website addresses to show Google the relevant information on that page. The ideal URL hierarchy format looks like this:
http://www.example.com/category-keyword/subcategory-keyword/primary-keyword.html
The most effective solution is to draw a road map or flow chart so you can see all of the website pages and how they link together.
Investing in Long-Term Lead Generation
As you are designing your marketing campaign in 2022, the most important thing you need to consider is how to achieve immediate results and ongoing leads in the future. Investing in SEO marketing is a great way to turn on a steady stream of leads. The outcome of an effective SEO strategy is brand awareness and online word of mouth.
A great marketing plan takes time to reap the rewards; however, taking action now will make the long-term benefits worth the investment.
