When it comes to the home service industry, the advent of the internet changed everything. While traditional advertising is still important, business owners now need to manage both their presence and reputation online. Without an understanding of digital marketing basics, are you sure you’re putting your best foot forward when it comes to search engine optimization?
Being an expert in helping home service companies thrive online, we know all the best practices to create a great experience wherever customers are. Here are the common mistakes home service businesses make with their marketing strategy.
1. Without Analytics, You Won’t Understand Your Customers
Setting up a website is an important step in ensuring your customers can find you when they need you. However, just having your site up isn’t enough to understand if you’re attracting the right content to convert customers and book service appointments. Many home service businesses make the mistake of forgetting to set up tracking.
Using tools like Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools, and Google Tag Manager can help you not only understand where your audience is coming from, but what they are doing on your website. This can help you determine how customers are finding your site, if you’re taking the right approach to local SEO, and which pages need improvement to encourage online conversions. If you’re not getting analytics SEO reports, you aren’t getting the whole picture of your digital marketing efforts.
2. Putting All Your Eggs in One Basket
When taking an online marketing approach, one of the common mistakes home service businesses make is putting all of their effort on only one channel. While SEO, paid search advertising, and email marketing may provide a strong return on investment, it’s important to not get tunnel vision on only one of those tools.
If Google makes a change to their search algorithm or decides you have too much Google Business Profile spam, your SEO strategy could drop off from page one. If you were only invested in SEO, that can significantly hurt your business. By diversifying your online marketing across multiple buckets — including SEO, social media, paid search, and email marketing — you can ensure that if one tactic drops off, you’ll have several more to rely on as you find a solution.
3. Underutilizing Paid Search
You pay for advertising on radio, television, and billboards. Why not use paid search engine advertising as well? Pay-per-click advertising can be a cost-effective way to ensure your services get in front of the customer faster, encouraging more conversions and earning more business.
What makes pay-per-click advertising a strong option is that you can also directly trace your return on advertising from when your customer clicks on the ad, to when they book a service call. With this information, you can determine which message is right for your customer, allowing you to best optimize all of your advertising efforts.
4. Ignoring Web Design
Ignoring web design is among the most common mistakes home service businesses make with their marketing strategy. It’s not enough to just have a website up on the internet. If your website doesn’t invoke a strong online presence, you can lose trust with your customers and drive them to your competition.
Just because you have a smaller business or fewer services than your competition doesn’t mean you shouldn’t focus on good design. Even the minor changes, such as ensuring you’re using your current logo and clear calls to action, can go a long way in encouraging customers to book that appointment online.
Bonus Tip: Good web design can synergize with both green SEO principles and site speed improvements. Both improvements can help you rank better in search, ultimately driving more visitors to your website and closing more business.
5. Forgetting Local SEO
Focusing solely on a broad SEO strategy can be great for visibility, but can miss your target audience: Homeowners in your service area. Home service businesses are inherently local, which makes local SEO key.
Ignoring local SEO is among the common mistakes home service businesses make with their marketing strategy. As you develop your service list and keywords, don’t forget the cities and communities you want to target. Building landing pages that emphasize where you work is one of the 10 essential digital marketing tactics you need for success online.
Avoiding These Mistakes Can Put You Ahead of the Local Pack
Making the most of your digital presence and avoiding the common mistakes home service businesses make with their marketing strategy can help you get ahead of the competition and secure more business for your team. With a simple focus on the basics, you can set yourself up for long-term success which is easily scalable as your business grows.
