Plumber & HVAC SEO: Search Engine Optimization For Plumbing Company

Plumbing & HVAC Company SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

There are two ways to get your plumbing website ranked higher on SERPs - SEO and SEM. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) refers to making modifications to different elements of your website over a period of time. In SEM (Search Engine Marketing...adwords and other paid advertising). Plumber SEO & HVAC SEO is very competitive as you compete against alot of your competitors locally where everyone wants to rank in top 3 positions.

Although SEM/adwords allows you to get a good rank quickly, the moment you stop spending on SEM/adwords, your website won’t feature in SERPs (organic search results). Also, you need to develop unique content so that you have something to show your audience when they visit your website and get it ranked organically.

When you begin with local SEO for you plumbing company, there are certain on-page SEO elements that you need to consider. Some of the essential on-page SEO elements to rank higher are listed below. Furthermore, this article will also help you to know what modifications need to be done for each element in order to get your plumbing website ranked higher.

1. Keywords

The keywords are critical in boosting your plumbing website pages chance of getting a higher rank in Google and Bing rankings. For this purpose, you need to use the keywords that are your customers searching for. You can get this information with different keywords search tools that are available over the web. Some of them include Keyword.io, Keyword Discovery, and WordStream’s keyword tool. Once you understand what keywords users are searching for related to plumbing, you need to include them on your webpage. Here are a few places you need to include those keywords to optimize your plumbing webpage.

Keyword in Title Tags

For good SEO, you need to ensure your title tags are correctly optimized. A title tag is a clickable text that is shown in the search result. It is to give a reader a hint of what are the content on that webpage. Accordingly, he can decide whether to visit the webpage or not. For example, if a person searches for "mistakes to avoid during plumbing" and in the SERPs, he gets multiple results. Now, if the title tag mentions "10 mistakes to avoid while plumbing", then the webpage will have content that talks about 10 plumbing mistakes to avoid. As a result, the readers can click on the title tag and view the webpage content. If the title tag does not match with the content on a webpage, then the visitors will leave your website immediately, leading to a high bounce rate. Thus, your title tag is the first point of contact for a reader. Hence, ensure that your title tag matches with your web content.

Likewise, include the relevant keywords in those title tags. Unless you include the right keywords in the title tags, search engine crawlers will not index your webpages and hence, your webpages won’t be featured on search results. If "plumbing services" are most searched, then include this keyword phrase for different webpages especially, blogs. For example, you can have blogs on topics such as "importance of plumbing services", "why your home needs plumbing services" or "plumbing services for residentials." Similarly, you can identify multiple keywords and create title/topics for your blogs, and include them in your title tags. If you want to focus your services for your local area alone, then you can add the place name in the title tag. For example, "plumbing services for residential in Alberta."

Keyword in URL

When you include keywords in the URLs, it provides a relevant signal to search engines and helps in enhancing your plumbing page’s rankings. Therefore, when you create a URL, ensure that you fit in the most important keywords right after the domain name. For instance, if the focused keyword is "cleaning drains", then your URL should appear as www.plumbingservices.com/cleaning/drains/. Be careful that you avoid a long URL address as Google weighs the first few words in the URL and emphasizes less focus on the others.

Keyword in Content

Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org

You can add multiple keywords in your content. Adding multiple keywords allows your webpage to be featured whenever those keywords are used. However, it is important to realize that you do not use excess keywords in the same content. Make sure you use different keywords across different content. This way, you create different content for specific keywords. Moreover, you create more content for your plumbing website.

Avoid the mistake of stuffing too many keywords in your content. Doing so is called keyword stuffing, which is considered a black hat SEO technique. If you want to use a keyword multiple times, then make sure your content is lengthy. An ideal number of times a specific keyword for 500 words article should not be more than 4 or 5 times.

Keyword in Images

When it comes to images, add the keywords in the alt tag section. You can only use one keyword for each image. Therefore, use a keyword only when it makes sense. The alt image tags help to rank your content in the search engines. Also, it should provide some description to the readers who click on your image. Hence, use keywords only when it is relevant to the images. The alt tag sends to search engines a relevancy signal and thus, helps you optimize your webpage. For instance, if the focused keyword phrase is "repairs to a drainage system" and your image has a picture of cracked drainage pipes, then add an alt tag which says "repairs to drainage system for your cracked pipes." If your CMS system does not include the alt tag option, then you need to download a plugin to use this feature.

Keyword in Meta Description Tag

Like alt tag in images and title tags, keywords in the meta description tag is also useful to help search engine crawlers to index your webpage for the keywords used. Moreover, the meta description is the description provided just below title tag and URL address on SERPs. This helps the readers get a preview snippet if the webpage contains the content that they are looking for. Therefore, if you want to increase traffic to your plumbing website, make sure that you add keywords in your meta description tag. However, there is a limit to the number of characters that your meta description tag can contain. Hence, you need to be selective in choosing the right sentences so that you convey the right message to the readers in order to persuade them to click on your website link.

2. Heading Tags

The heading tags, also known as <h1> tags, are critical to optimize your plumbing webpage. With heading tags, the search engines are able to determine what your webpage is about and which search query it relates to. In simple words, it is a way to decipher your webpage content and identify what it is about. Create a separate heading tag for each plumbing webpage and also include the main topic. Depending on your CMS software, heading tags can also be your title tags.

3. Links

Providing internal links helps search engine crawlers to crawl through your plumbing website easily. When you hyperlink any texts, ensure that it is relevant to what you link it to. For example, if you link texts such as "increase life of water heaters", then it should link to an article that suggests some tips or precautions to increase the life of your water heaters. Also, if you have an article that has a good rank on SERPs, then add links within the article to other relevant articles. This way, it enhances the chances of the other articles featuring on SERPs as well. In short, interlinking webpages passes page rank between them. It also keeps the readers on your website for a longer period of time. This is also important as search engines consider the amount of time the traffic spends on your website to determine the quality of your webpage. Therefore, your webpage ranking improves.

When you conduct internal linking, you can either link back to the category page, link back to subcategory page, link back to the homepage or use a combination of all these three methods of linking.

4. Load Time

You cannot expect your visitors to wait for more than few seconds to load your webpage. If they find your webpage taking time to load, they will immediately leave your plumbing website. Contact your website developer and ensure that your webpage does not take more than 3 seconds to load. Try and reduce the load time as much as possible. Search engines consider load time as one of the most important factors to rank your website and therefore, optimizing your load time is something that you cannot ignore.

5. Mobile-Friendly Website

With the increasing number of smartphone users, it is a no brainer that you should have a mobile-friendly website. In fact, if a customer is looking for immediate plumbing service, then he is most likely to search on Google using a smartphone. Even though your website is desktop-friendly and has a good ranking on search results, it will not get a good rank on mobile devices if your website is not mobile-friendly. Therefore, ensure that your plumbing website is mobile-friendly to avoid losing on potential customers. Contact your web developer to create a better mobile experience for your website. In fact, Google also runs a mobile-friendly test and suggests areas of improvement for the same.

6. Content

Your content should be unique and should not be plagiarized. If Google finds out that your content is duplicated, then it will penalize your website and degrade your ranking. In case, you are unable to provide unique content, it is recommended that you take the help of a professional content marketing firm. Moreover, you should provide content on a regular basis. When you provide regular content, Google knows that you have something unique and it helps to improve your website ranking. However, it is difficult to come up with content often hence, it is better to either have a dedicated person to create your content or take the help of a specialized firm.

These are just some of the SEO elements to rank higher and get more traffic to your plumbing website. Other elements such as HTML and XML Sitemaps, Server Configurations, use of Canonical Tags, keeping Clean Code, making JavaScript and CSS External, and having a standard URL address (domain name) are equally important. Indeed optimizing your plumbing website involves many SEO elements. Furthermore, there are always some or the other updates in Google’s algorithms every day which need to be monitored and changes should be incorporated in your plumbing website. Thus, it requires a dedicated person or a team to handle your SEO efforts. If you lack the right SEO expertise, then get in touch with an SEO expert firm for your plumbing website to help you out.

Traffic to Conversion

Lets assume that your plumbing website have a good traffic count but a poor conversion rate? You may even have a good ranking on SERPs but low lead generation. In such situations, there are mainly two factors leading to a low conversion rate. Either your SEO efforts are focused on wrong target group who visit your website but do not have any plumbing need, or your landing page is poorly designed. The chances of it being the latter are quite high. A person looking for plumbing services may be in quick need of it. So when he comes to the website and finds that your website has a poor design or finds it difficult to navigate through it, he will move out immediately. Even though you provide the best plumbing services in your locality, you end up losing clients. To prevent it from happening, you need to design a plumbing website that enhances user experience. For this purpose, you need to test different elements on a webpage by performing A/B testing. You may wonder how to do A/B testing and how does it work? To answer your questions, continue reading this article.

How does A/B testing work?

In A/B testing, you compare two versions of a webpage to determine which one gets more people to stay on your plumbing website for long and eventually turn into leads. This is done by showing two variants of a webpage (A/B webpage) to similar visitors simultaneously. The webpage which gives a better conversion rate is selected as a permanent one.

How to do A/B testing?

To begin the process of A/B testing your plumbing website, follow these steps:

Understand Your Website Data

To get access to your website data, use a website analytical tool. Google Analytics is an ideal tool that helps you understand how your traffic flows through the plumbing website. It also tells you which webpages are performing better and which webpages have a high bounce rate. Choose the ones that are performing poorly for A/B testing.

Understand Your User Behavior

By using tools such as Heatmaps, Visitor Recordings, and Form Analysis, you come to know about user behavior. These tools will tell you what is stopping the visitors from converting into a lead. For example, after going through your entire blog post, visitors may leave your website. There could be two reasons for this behavior. Either your blog article was not convincing enough for visitors to book your services or the call-to-action button was not appealing to click and go forward.

Determine What Needs A/B Testing

Based on the website data and user behavior insights, identify the elements that require A/B testing. For example, you may consider changing the background color of website’s landing page or changing the font style of the texts. You can even choose multiple elements to perform A/B testing simultaneously.

Start with A/B Testing and Analyze

In this step, you start with testing different elements for your website and monitor its performance. For instance, you may test your homepage by adding two different background images. Accordingly, you will find that one background image performs better in terms of the duration of time spent on the homepage or other indicators of your choice. However, be careful that you do not test too many variations on two webpages at the same time. It will make you difficult to identify which element is influencing the conversion rate. For example, if you have separate images, colors, font style, different words, etc for the two webpages, then it becomes impossible to figure out what change in the which element is instrumental in increasing your conversion rate.

Incorporate Changes

After you have analyzed your findings, make the necessary changes to your webpages to drive more traffic and conversions. Ensure that there is a clear winner among the two variations. If there is hardly any difference between the two variations, then look at changing other web elements or add another variation to the existing tests.

Running A/B Tests

Before we get to running A/B tests, it is necessary to know that there are two types of A/B testing – on-site test and off-site test. The tests that are run for elements within the plumbing website come under on-site test. The off-site tests are concerned with testing your sales emails or the ad copy for your plumbing PPC campaign. Since we’re focusing on A/B testing for plumbing website; we will talk only about on-site testing. Let’s take a look at different elements that need to be considered for A/B testing.

A/B Testing Elements

Basically, you can test every element on your plumbing elements. It will include the following:

• Headlines and Sub headlines
• Paragraph Text (font style)
• Background Colors
• Testimonials
• Call-to-action Button (text, shape, size, color)
• Links
• Images (resolution, type, number of images)
• Content (short, descriptive, tone of content)
• Social Proof and Awards or Badges
• Media mentions
• Positioning of All the Above Elements

However, you should be careful in testing those elements which are important for you. For example, when you run ad campaigns, then your landing page elements such as call-to-action button and visual elements become more important. Similarly, if you want to improve your blog webpages, then the content becomes a more relevant element for A/B testing.

When you perform A/B testing, you can also test things in conjunction with each other. For example, you may test image A with landing page A and image B with landing page B. Likewise, later you may test image A with landing page B and image B with landing page A. This type of A/B testing will give you a clearer result especially when there isn’t much difference between the results or you get mixed conclusions.

How Long to Run A/B Tests?

There is no specific time-period to determine the length of A/B testing. Just like SEO, it’s an on-going process and you need to test different elements on your website to enhance your conversion rate. If switching to a particular image increases conversion rate, then likewise there’ll be other images which might even better your current conversion rate. Hence, there is no point that you can say that "I have reached my optimal conversion point." Depending on the amount of traffic driven to your plumbing website, A/B tests can be run for anywhere from a few weeks to even a month. However, care should be taken that you do not focus all your efforts on constantly improving on one single element alone. If you find success by changing one element, then try testing the others as well. Testing a single element at a time will help you with accurate results.

Now that you are aware of how to do A/B testing, get started with improvising your plumbing website. As A/B testing helps you keep users on your website for a longer time and improve conversion, it also assists in boosting your SEO efforts. Hence, A/B testing your plumbing website is something that you should not miss out on. However, you need a specialized and a dedicated team to conduct A/B tests and track its results. Indeed it is a time-consuming task but worth implementing if you want to increase conversion rate and get more leads for your plumbing website. If you lack technical support to go ahead with A/B testing for your plumbing website, then it is recommended that you take help of a digital marketing firm.