Given that the average small business is set to spend around $75,000 on digital marketing this year, it can be hard to budget for extras. That budget could get depleted quickly, leaving you to handle some do it yourself SEO.
However, when you take SEO into your own hands, you not only have more control but you can learn more about how business is conducted online.
Here are four ways you can improve SEO for your landscaping company.
1. A Better Domain Age
If you want people to go to your landscaping website, you need to look great on search engines, probably one of the easiest things to fix is your domain’s age. If your domain is set to expire in a few weeks, search engines could see you as less serious.
While search engines heavily factor in your past and current state, they also consider where you’ll be in the future.
Check out your domain expiration date either at the company where you hold your domain or at whois.com. If it’s set to expire this year, renew it for two years.
When you buy a new domain, buy your domain for several years. This says to search engines that find you that you’re serious about your business and plan to stick around for a while.
When you have a strong and steady domain age that you can maintain for years, you’ll win respect and climb up the rankings. By buying for years in the future, don’t expect to jump from number 300 in your results to number 1. However, it will still factor into your search engine profile.
2. Use Local Keywords
When people search for businesses and services online, search engines often assume that they’re looking for a product closest to them. If you don’t believe it, go ahead and test this algorithm out. It’s easy.
Type in “pizza” and start your search. You won’t be directed toward the history of pizza or a website called pizza.com. Search engines will try to figure out where you want pizza from that’s nearest to where you’re searching from.
The way that search engines can find your landscaping company is if there are local keywords all throughout your website. You’re probably aware of the importance of using keywords on your website, but you might not realize that it’s more than just littering your page with terms. You need to add some specificity.
You need to define your most important target region for service and buckle down. Your terms should talk about what city you’re in, which neighborhood, which ones you want to serve, and what’s nearby. If you’re near a major highway or a massive landmark, let your potential customers know via your keywords.
To maximize your ROI and make sure you aren’t losing visitors who come to your site and quickly leave, every site owner and brand should be investing time and money into their remarketing efforts. This will bring high-quality traffic back to your site at a fraction of the cost of acquiring a completely new visitor.
When they’re in that area searching for businesses like yours, you’ll come up high in the results.
3. Better Title Tags
When search engines are looking through the information on your site to decide whether or not you’re a good match for a search, they see more than you do. There is metadata that can be cleverly hidden or scattered throughout your site that can reveal things about your site. Your site itself has a title tag that should be around 50 characters long.
With these tags, you can tell search engines what they’re looking at, what type of content you offer, and where you’re located. If you’re based in Beverly Hills and specialize in exotic flowers, a title tag like “Beverly Hills exotic flower tropical garden landscaping” is an ideal choice.
Title tags can be added to images that you have as well as every page. If you have a photo of a lovely bird of paradise, don’t just leave the photo on its own. Add a title tag that says “bird of paradise Beverly Hills landscaping” so that search engines can send you more visitors.
Use the meta descriptions that are placed at the top of every HTML page as well. In these descriptions, which should be around 150 characters, write short descriptions about your pages. Search engines will display this information below your URL to let visitors know what they’re about to click on and whether it’s relevant.
Do your research so that you know more about websites than your competitors.
4. Take Advantage of Directories
Since very few cities are bothering to deliver you a printed book of the yellow pages anymore, it’s important that you take the digital replacement seriously. Online business directories like Yelp, Google My Business, and Yahoo! Even better, is if you take the time to get extremely niche focused with you directly, like what is being done at CBD Hemp Finder and Canada Bridal Directory. The more niche you can get, the better you audience targeting, and also the easier it will be to rank your site. Local are the next best thing for local business owners. They offer more information via maps, photos, open hours, and even customer reviews.
When most users look for products and services in their area, they’ll get results that point them to these directories. If you’re not taking advantage of them, claiming your listings, and verifying all the information on them as true, drop everything and take care of that now.
If someone has a problem with Franklin Landscaping and you run Franklin and Sons Landscape design, there’s a possibility your information could get mixed up. Someone could have entered information about your company under Franklin Landscaping or vice versa. This might seem trivial, but not when you start considering that the other Franklin could be getting bad reviews.
If you don’t clear things up, someone getting bad service from Franklin could take your ratings down. To prepare for this and to build strength for your own business, ask your best customers to rate you on Yelp, Google, and Yahoo.
Do It Yourself SEO Is Easy
If you’re worried about the prospect of do it yourself SEO, you’ll find that it’s much easier than you thought. With a few quick google searches, you can find a few ways to fix up things on your site, hammer out the kinks, and prepare yourself for much more traffic.
If you’d never considered it before, you might be surprised at how you can increase your business by blogging. Check out our guide to find out more.