There are several factors that make it absolutely necessary for cleaning companies to focus on building a strong SEO foundation. You want to rank high in search engine results pages (SERPs), you want consumers to actively search for your business in the exact moment of their need, and of course you want to effectively boost your business bottom-line. All of these goals can only be met if you have laid out a rock-solid SEO foundation for your cleaning or restoration business.
So if you want to secure your space within search engine results pages (SERPs), then SEO is something you need to take very seriously.
What can SEO do for my Cleaning or Restoration Business?
This of course is a valid question to ask – especially if you are new to SEO. The easiest way to answer this question is by considering the multiple ways in which SEO can benefit your cleaning service. But for now, let’s look at two of the biggest benefits of SEO for your business. All the others gains such as improved brand awareness, easier user navigation for all your digital real-estate, improved business bottom-line, are directly tied to the following two SEO advantages.
Let’s start with the big one – did you know that cleaning services website and pages that are optimized for search engines will beadvantageously viewed or positioned within SERPs?
The second big advantage here is that regardless of your business size or scope of operations, if your website and other digital assets are search engine optimized, then it levels the playing field. In other words, it allows you the space and opportunity to take on and even better your competitors.
However, putting in place a solid SEO foundation requires both time and resources as well as the right kind of technical skills – something that can be challenging for small businesses. And it is precisely for this reason that small businesses often shy away from focusing on SEO for their business.
The good news however, is that your SEO doesn’t have to be something that you dread. For one, SEO is not rocket science. All you need to do is take some time out to understand the basics and then you can go ahead and plan a strong SEO foundation for your cleaning services business.
7 Important SEO Steps for Cleaning and Restoration Services
As mentioned above, if you can master a few SEO basics, you can easily go ahead and lay a solid SEO foundation for your cleaning or restoration business. Here are top seven SEO strategies for you to consider.
- Identify your Target Audience
The first step of building a rock solid SEO foundation for your cleaning or restoration business should start with identifying your target audience. You need to know who your website and other social estate has to cater to – without this information you might as well be flying in the dark.
Of course as a business, you definitely will have a fair idea of your audience base. But here’s the thing – a lot of businesses make the mistake of generalizing. It can be for anyone and everyone. Except you aren’t in the business of catering to every single user. You want to connect with users who have a clear and definite need for your services and products.
So start by narrowing down your target market space and focus on optimizing for your specific niche.
There are a few things you want to keep in mind when identifying your target audience and establishing your niche. Consider the following;
- Define and identify your ideal customer – get into specifics (age range, gender, spending range, kind of content they typically consume, their areas of interests).
- Track and understand their online activity – when are they online? When do they look up for information or go online?
- What kind of content type (articles, videos, blogs, social content etc.) do they actively consume?
- Are they active online vis-à-vis their interactions with the content they consume – via comments, questions, or inquiries about services or products that interest them?
- What are the keywords they use when searching for services and products or when looking up for relevant information about your industry?
- Are they following your competitors or brands that offer services that are similar to what you offer?
These are some of the most important questions you need to answer when identifying your audience and defining your niche. Gaining insight into these areas will help you understand who you have to market to and connect with.
- Plan your Content
The first step should actually give you a fairly good idea about setting up a content plan for your cleaning or restoration business. Knowing what sells with your customers is half the battle won. Now it’s just a matter of going ahead and planning how and what you are going to offer by way of content.
Another advantage of planning your content is that it allows you plan a content schedule – these can move side-by-side with your business goals and objectives. So if you plan on launching a new service, then planning your content would mean getting content organized in time for the service launch and making sure so it is both relevant and matches your new service.
There’s yet another benefit of planning your content – you don’t have to rush through ideas or content creation just before the deadline or when you are busy doing other important digital marketing stuff for your business. Furthermore, when you spend time planning your content, chances are you will churn out quality content as opposed to what you create when you are pushed for time.
- Optimize for On-page SEO
Now that you have identified your target audience and set up a content plan, the next area of focus should be on-page SEO.
How does On-page SEO help? Ok so simple answer – when creating all that fantastic content for your website, you obviously want as much traffic for your content as possible right? Well, the key is on-page SEO.
Here are the key areas of focus for on-page SEO;
Keywords
Research keywords that match your user intent and use them within your copy as organically and seamlessly as possible.
Optimize your Title – In addition to using keywords within your content, you should also look at how you can include keywords in other areas of your content including in your content title. Another way to optimize your title is via the use of modifiers. The use of certain terms such as “How To,” “Top (numerical character),” or “Best” can boost your ranking potential for long-tail versions of trending keywords.
URL
URLs that rank are the ones that are crisp, short, and sweet. Also make sure you place your target keywords within the first 3 to 5 words in your URL.
Responsive Design
A responsive design can help you rank better in SERPs since it is Google’s favored version of website configuration. I will talk about mobile optimization more a little later.
Outbound Links
Outbound links play a crucial role in helping search crawlers categorize the topic of your page and also help in establishing your site credibility. Search engines want to show up the most optimized and relevant search results to user queries. If you site uses trustworthy outbound links, it simply goes to show that your site is reliable which in turn will drive the positioning of your site in SERPs.
Internal Links
While focusing on outbound links, don’t forget about internal links. The point of using internal links is again to help search engines establish the importance of pages on the same domain. They also help in establishing strong site architecture – something you need to focus on as a part of your SEO strategy. Ideally, your posts/page should include atleast 2 to 3 internallinks.
Optimize Images
While optimizing your content and pages, you also need to focus on image optimization. So ensure that your image file names include your chosen target keyword. It is also advisable to include your target keyword within the image ALT Text.
- Optimize for the Mobile
Google’s mobile-first indexing push has resulted in businesses now focusing on mobile-optimization as a major area of SEO focus.
The reasoning is solid – your consumers are on mobile devices so it only makes sense that you focus on optimizing for mobile devices if you want to stay competitive. Also if you don’t want Google to penalize you in SERPs, then optimizing for mobile is something you just cannot ignore or take lightly. Here’s something else you need to know – responsive sites will be indexed on a priority when compared to simple desktop versions.
If something is going to impact your SERP rankings, then you will need to optimize your site for mobile devices and also learn how to implement Schema.org structured data.
- Page Load Speed
In addition to optimizing for mobile devices, you also need to ensure your mobile sites load quickly. Page load speed matters because if your site takes more than 3 seconds to load, users won’t hesitate to drop you and move to other sites that support faster page load. Your site will also as a result suffer from higher bounce rates.
And guess what – a majority of those visitors will not come back ever! So one bad experience and you will be written off.
Sites that load faster on the other hand stand to gain much. Google and other search engines are 100% focused on providing the best user-experience (UX). And page load speed is a major aspect of that stellar UX. Of course, if your site UX is good, then it will result in improved user engagement which in turn can drive your site traffic and conversion rate.
Here are three important Page Load Speed suggestions to follow;
- Make sure you use a browser cache.
- Use a content delivery network (CDN) as it helps in lowering latency and can also support faster website load up.
- Make sure you optimize/compress all images – this again can help in effectively reducing your page load speed.
- Create a Sitemap
If your goal is to gain greater search engine visibility and to rank high in SERPs, then you need to create a well-structured sitemap for your website.Obviously, if your pages enjoy higher ranking, then they will pull in greater traffic as well. So this is something that you need to focus on right at the website development stage.
While there are different forms or sitemaps, XML sitemaps are the most effective when it comes to SEO. XML sitemaps offer the best benefits since they make it easy for search engines to easily discover and navigate their way through your site content.
So what is a XML sitemap?
Basically, a XML (Extensible Markup Language) sitemap is a text file which contains all your site URL details. And these details are used by search engines to quickly find all your important site pages which in turn helps them in effectively indexing your site.
In other words, your sitemap simply serves as a table of content of your site for search engines. So regardless of whether your cleaning or restoration business website is new or old, you definitely need to focus on creating a sitemap.
An XML sitemap is needed specifically in the following cases;
- For business websites that are large or massive in size.
- For websites that contain a large content archive.
- For sites that are new and don’t have too many external links.
- For sites that contain a lot of rich media content.
- Set-up Google Analytics
Lastly, in order for all the above steps to come into play in an effective and comparable manner, you need analytics. In fact, your SEO foundation will go nowhere unless you have analytics to record and asses results of all your SEO efforts and strategies.
Carrying out site assessments is something that you need to get used to as a way of mapping your progress and also as a way of introducing tweaks within your SEO plan if you feel you are going wrong somewhere.
Google analytics is one of the best and most effective analytics tools available to businesses today. So it is advisable that you set up Google Analytics for your cleaning or restoration business website as soon as the site is created instead of waiting for until after the launching of your website. Having insight into the performance of your website can help you improve on you efficiency and also enable you to continually optimize for search engines.
You can set up your Google Analytics account, by visiting Google.com/Analytics Once you have signed-up, you will be provided with a unique Analytics tracking code. Go ahead and paste this code into your site after your site has been configured.
There is a wide range of analytical data that you can collect from your Google Analytics account. These include the following;
- Easily track who is viewing your page.
- Track the path of discovery and also the number of sessions.
- Gain insight into who is linking to your page as well as find out the type of content which is being linked.
- Easily access keyword information including click-through-rate (CTR) and total keyword impressions.
The intelligence provided by Google Analytics can be used to continually improve and enhance your entire SEO structure. Effective use of analytics is an on-going process and it does take some amount of time and effort to keep going. However, the benefits clearly outweigh the effort which makes it all worthwhile in both the short and long term.
To Wrap Up
A strong SEO foundation is an integral part of digital success. So it is best that you focus on establishing your SEO structure as soon as possible, if you haven’t already done so.
You can use the above SEO checklist to create a map for your SEO foundation. This of course is a basic list of where you need to focus your attention when it comes to SEO. And as mentioned above, SEO is an on-going process so you will need to continually learn and improve your game-plan as your business progresses.
