SEO Strategies for Service Based Businesses

SEO strategies for service based businesses can be a really effective way of growing your business. When looking for a painter for a house or a plumber, most people generally start with a Google search. Should your website rank well on Google, it will result in a stream of leads. Leads that can be converted to paying customers

Whatever industry you are, SEO especially for service based businesses, has the highest return on investment.

When these SEO strategies for services based businesses are paired with an additional tool like email marketing, only the sky is the limit.

But SEO in itself may seem like a black box. How do you as a service business owner leverage SEO? How do you come up with SEO strategies for service based businesses?

While there are no quick solutions, there are some strategies you could implement today. These strategies will help push you in the right direction. Oh, did we mention that SEO is not a quick solution? SEO for all its benefits, takes a very long time to work. In that breath, before we get to the strategies, let us discuss when SEO might not work for you.

Instances to avoid for your SEO strategy to succeed

While there are a lot of benefits associated with SEO, there are instances where I would advise you to stay away from SEO.

If you need a quick fix

The economy, inflation, the virus that shall not be named etc. Businesses are struggling. Getting sales has been proving harder and harder for many businesses. Because of this, a lot of service business owners find themselves in situations where they have their backs against the wall. They need to drum up business, and they need to do it yesterday.

If you are in such a situation, unfortunately, SEO will not work for you.

An SEO strategy takes at least 6 months to see results. And that is if, you do everything right. Also results are not typical. For some businesses, it takes them a year or two to experience the benefits of SEO.

So if you are a services business owner that is under pressure, or you are a sales and marketing manager under pressure, don’t bank on SEO to be a quick fix. There are a lot of unethical “SEO experts” who will tell you it can be done in a week or within a month. The only thing that will happen in that duration is their bank account balance increasing.

Lack of resources

I felt the need to personally discuss this. Resources in this case mean money and time. Either or. Only nothing can be achieved with nothing. You need a level of resources to properly implement these SEO strategies for service based businesses.

Either you need time, to learn about SEO strategies specifically made for service based businesses and to actively implement the strategy. Or you need money to hire a specialist to do it.

If you have neither time nor money, this is going to be a problem. I don’t mean to be rude or be discouraging but, you cannot build a skyscraper in the clouds.

I get a lot of inquiries from service business owners on how they can leverages SEO. So then ask them, what do you have to work with? A lot of them say, nothing. They don’t have the time to do it themselves, and they don’t have the cash to pay someone to do it.

The only saving grace about SEO is that it is relatively inexpensive.

Now that I have gotten that off my chest we can proceed.

Here are some SEO strategies for service based businesses

Understand Keywords and use them well

Basically a keyword is a word or string of words that describe the content of your website to search engines. Most people understand that keywords are important, but few actually know how to optimize a website for their chosen keywords.

So here are some of the areas you should add your keyword;

Your Page Title and SEO title

Ideally you should add your chosen keyword at the start of your titles. Especially if they are long. For example, if your chosen keyword is “Barbershops”, then your SEO title could be something in the lines of “Barbershops in Texas that also provide massages”

As you can see, subtly and naturally incorporating your keyword into the SEO title will help Google know what its about.

Subheadings

The fact that you have taken the time to properly organize your web page into readable sections is commendable. Now you need to go further and figure out how to fit your keywords into your sub headings. Although it is not completely necessary, it will go a long way towards you SEO efforts.

The very first introductory paragraph

Also try to incorporate your keywords at the very beginning of your introductory paragraph. Try to get to the point quickly in your first paragraph. Because this is often the first bit of content people will read on your website, put a bit of work into it.

Alt text for your images

For now search engines can’t read texts. Not yet at least. So they cant tell what is going on in a picture. This is why it is paramount to add descriptive text in the alt tags for your images. If possible you should also pepper your choice keywords.

The all important meta description

This often forms part of the text that is displayed by Google on the Google Search. So its importance cannot be underestimated. Use it to describe in brief what people can find in your website. The meta tag should entice the person to click on it. If it contains your keyword, then there is a high likely hood that someone will click on the result on the Google SERP.

Google will notice this increased click through rate and rank it higher.

The URL slug for your page

This is the second part of a URL. For example, www.ahadisoft.com/seo-strategies. Here “SEO-strategies” is the slug. Ensure that it describes accurately the content of your web page and your keyword is included.

Content has always been king in regards to SEO

This was true when Google and other search engines were starting out. It is also true for today. Content is a key part in SEO strategies for service based businesses. You see, Google, all it is, is a mechanism for organizing data. Pure and simple. It helps people find the information they are looking for.

So Google and other search engines have a special place in their hearts for website that are an authority in their field. They love websites that can be used as a resource to research a certain topic.

But how do they tell that a website is an authority in its field?

Content

And not just content, content that resonates with the website visitors. Right now you are probably wondering, you are just a service business operator, not a publisher. Plus you are more interested in getting more clients as opposed to playing the role of publisher. And you are right. Getting customers tends to be a first priority.

But to get customers via search engines, you have to “pay the price”. That is you have to give them a reason to send traffic to your website. And it just so happens the only reason they care about is content.

So what kind of content?

Types of content a service business can publish as part of its SEO strategy

Testimonials

Are you good at what you do? Do you have people ready and willing to sing your praises? Then this is the perfect way to show people that you a worthy of their hard earned cash. Testimonials, combined with a good keyword research is the stuff of winners.

But I don’t just mean the traditional one sentence or paragraph testimonial. Although that works really well to.

For example, if you have an accounting practice, you could publish an article on how you were able to save your clients lots of money, through a loop hole in the tax code. Lets assume a fictional tax strategy of “investing in municipal bonds”. In the article you could go into detail about your practice, your approach to problem solving and finally your values.

Then you title could be something like “How we helped XYZ enterprise save millions with municipal bonds”. or “Tax saving strategies with municipal bonds: a case study”. Let us assume your article rank on Google or any other search engine. Then everyone searching for say “municipal bonds” or “tax saving” strategies will find your article. The reader will be impressed at how you helped XYZ enterprise and they will contact you hoping you could do the same for them.

Another example is the

TESTIMONIAL VIDEO.

Videos also rank on Google search. Instead of an article, you could do a video on XYZ enterprise and show people how you helped them. The process is the same. Google indexes it and ranks it, when people search it surfaces, they click on it and you have a lead.

How to guides

What better way to attract people to your website than showing them how to do something. As a matter of fact, this is often the best content strategy you could implement for your business. There is always an influx of people wanting tips and tricks.

Creating how to guides also puts you a level ahead of your competitors. How so? Instead of being a typical money hungry business, you lead with value first. You give your customers something they find useful. They are more likely to buy from you because that initial step of value creation creates trust. How to guides from a crucial part of SEO strategies for service based businesses.

Lets us discuss more on the benefits of creating how to guides.

How “how to guides ” enhance your SEO strategy

Builds trust

As mentioned above, how to guides often builds trust.

Demonstrates competence

How better else to show people that you can actually do the job? How to guides allow you to demonstrate you knowledge and industry expertise. You stop being for example the average plumber in your region and transcend into a valued advisor.

Boost SEO rankings

Because people are always searching for how to guides, it is easy for you to rank. How easy? Very easy. Whether in blog format or in video format, your how to guides have the potential of attracting a lot of website visitors. Visitors who, as we like to mention, can be converted to paying customers.

Research Data

Research data is what makes you into an industry thought leader. The media and other publications will love you because they can quote you and use you as a reference. As a result you get tons of free PR and the all too valuable backlinks which are critical for SEO. Backlinks are essentially links to your website. People will link back to your website, if they use your website as a source. So they link back to your website to help readers get more information.

The more backlinks you have, the more authority in your industry that Google deems that you have. As a result, they will rank your website higher. So you get free traffic from those who are referring to you, and also more traffic from Google search. All those web visitors have the potential of buying from your service business.

As a service business, you need to have your finger on the pulse of your industry. You need to know the advancements that are being made and the changing trends.

Research data for service based business SEO can be obtained by various methods.

How to obtain research data for SEO purposes

Here are a few tips and tricks to research something.

Surveys and polls

Surveys and polls are great at getting an accurate reading of what people are thinking and feeling. This is because, the information comes from the people. No big assumptions are made.

Search the literature

A lot of articles online are based of data. If you find something interesting, you could contact the author and request access to the data. From there, all you have to do is to expound on the data and use your industry knowledge to dig deeper. Who knows what valuable insights you might uncover

Use your network

You never know, maybe a friend or business partner has the datasets that you need. Using your network is a reliable way of getting access to often times, valuable datasets that are hidden away.

Paid influencer content

There is a big reason why influencers are called influencers. They have sizable audiences hang on their every word. Leverage this to create SEO worthy content. This is a nifty SEO strategy that is not widely known but highly effective.

People search and seek out their favorite influencer. Meaning they go out and Google the name of their influencer of interest. If you can collaborate with influencers, every time a person searches out an influence your enterprise also appears.

That association can build a sort of “halo” for your brand. In addition to that, all the followers of the influencer become aware of you. This will lead to more inquiries and more deals closed.

Ebooks

This can fall into the tutorials category or it can be a category on its own. Think of this like a very large organized blog in PDF format.

You could create Ebooks on a myriad of topics that are relevant in your industry. This is the clever bit. After you create your amazing Ebook, you could offer it to people for free in return for their email address.

Email marketing tips can be found here.

You will then be able to build a robust email list that you can leverage for website traffic and sales.

Leverage local online citations

Some time ago, I had started a food delivery business. I filled out my details into every local directory I could find. Years later, when I do a Google search those pages rank.

There are some really good ones like Yelp. Adding your website link there can help get you traffic. It is also a backlink of sorts. Having other websites that link to your website helps in ranking, although not much. But it does really help in increasing your overall traffic.

Technical considerations for SEO strategy success

There are some technical issues you need to iron out to ensure 100% success of your SEO strategy for your service based business.

The technical SEO audit

There are instances where you may do everything right. You research and find the perfect keywords. Then you create amazing content. But the all too valuable organic traffic fails to materialize. Then you are left angry, spent and discouraged.

Sometimes the best SEO strategies fail because of technical issues. Let us look at some of them. A deeper read on technical SEO especially home page SEO can be found here.

Poor loading speeds

All the content in the world won’t save you if your website loads slowly. A slow loading speed is often an indicator of poor user experience. People hate slow websites. If your website takes more than a few seconds to load, they leave. Don’t lose out of valuable traffic because of this.

There are some things you could do to improve your loading speed, they include;

1. Utilizing a quality web host – sometimes all it takes is a good website host. If you want to build a truly transformative business, you can’t do it on cheap shared hosting on weak servers. You just can’t.
2. Lay off the JavaScript – JavaScript helps a lot in interactivity but it also has the unfortunate effect of slowing down your website. You don’t need all that interactivity though. A few pop ups are fine, but anything beyond that will just cause more harm than good.
3. Optimize images – Images are important in conveying information and emotions, but you need to optimize your images. If you are on WordPress, you can use a plugin like Smush to compress your images.
4. Caching is important – what caching does is that it helps a website retrieve data faster by reducing the need to access all the underlying storage layers. When data is first fetched, it is stored. So all subsequent requests use that stored data. So no unnecessary database requests. This makes for a fast web experience, which translates very well to SEO success.

Crawlability issues

Often times, this is an issue of the Google crawlers being blocked. This can be intentional, by modifying the robots.txt. Alternatively it can be brought about by poor coding and technical layout.

JavaScript leaning platforms are notorious for crawling issues. Last time I checked platforms like React have struggled. Although Google says it can crawl and index JavaScript based websites easily, its always better to be on the safe side. You can have two platforms. A JavaScript app that can have all the interactivity that you want. Then you can have a WordPress platform, under a sub domain for example for the SEO and traffic. This combination will work really well.

Keyword stuffing

When it comes to keywords, we are like evangelists. We are always harping on and on about the importance of optimizing for keywords. However, people sometimes take this too far. They do what is called keywords stuffing. Basically stuffing keywords in every nook and cranny of their web page. Sometimes even the content is unreadable because it was created for search engines not normal human beings.

The does the opposite for your SEO and will tank your SEO strategy.

Use keywords naturally throughout your content. Don’t force them in.

If you implement what we have discussed today, you are guaranteed success in your SEO strategies for service based businesses