Search Engine optimisation or SEO for Small Businesses is becoming increasingly important in the trades services industry where there are plenty of suppliers with little or no service differentiation. Simply put,[bctt tweet=”for your customers to be able to find your Trades Services Business, you need to come on the first page of Search Engine results” via=”no”] and that too, naturally!
Today’s customers are tech savvy and no longer look in yellow pages or telephone directories when a plumbing emergencies arise. Rather, a home owner in Sydney with a leaking toilet would search for “Bathroom plumbers in Sydney” or “Plumber to fix leaking toilet in Sydney”, and if your business website does not appear in the search results, you just lost another valuable client to one of your competitors.
That’s exactly why your Trades Services Business need to stand out when it comes to SEO for Small Businesses.
So how can you do it? By making Search Engines happy. It’s as simple as that! Let me explain in my usual acronym style using the keyword SEARCH.
Secure Website
Having a secure website for small business means moving from http:// to https://. Search Engines seem to like that extra “s” and for a good enough reason.
With website visitors becoming more and more conscious about sharing personal details, having [bctt tweet=”a secure website could be the very reason your customers trust you and not your competitors.”] This is especially true for ecommerce websites or ones with a login feature.
When leading search engines first announced that they will consider website security as a ranking factor, few took it seriously. However, with most of your traffic coming through organic search, it always pays off to listen.
Security certificates are usually added at the end of the home page and tends to enhance website credibility in the eyes of the customers.
Ease Of Use
Creating a Website For Your Business is not enough. [bctt tweet=”With more than half of your customers using a mobile device to search online, do you have a mobile-friendly website?”] Your Small Business Website Design needs to be such that it’s easy to be viewed on multiple screens and by multiple browsers through various devices i.e. mobile/tablet/laptop.
Since mobile-friendly websites deliver a good user-experience, it increases the probability of site visitors to stay longer on your website decreasing the bounce rate (a lot of people visiting only one page and leaving).
Additionally, since it’s the same website, and not a separate website for mobile devices, it saves you the trouble of working on the search engine optimisation aspect from the scratch.
Apart from the laid out guidelines, your website must also have a good design, one that makes it easy for your site visitors to find the content they are looking for, such as “request a quote” and navigate easily through various services.
Accuracy and Consistency of Information
Your customers are increasingly doing non-branded searches every day. What does this mean? This means that a majority of your customers don’t have loyalty to any specific Trades Services business and are only interested in finding a contractor in their area who can get the job done.
In one sentence, [bctt tweet=”SEO For Small Businesses begins with NAP – name, address, phone-number.”]
Getting listed on online business directories with accurate and consistent information i.e. business name, address, phone number, is referred to as NAP or NAPW if you have a website address. It is one of the most challenging issues for small business these days, yet it is the key to getting found by search engines like Google and Bing.
These listings, called citations or mentions of your business information on other web pages help develop a certain level of credibility about your business and are particularly important for niches like plumbing, electrical etc. where there are thousands of suppliers offering more or less the same service.
Reviews and Ratings
Currently Google displays top 3 most relevant businesses for a given local search such as “24 hour emergency plumbers in Sydney”. Being in the top three slot means getting more clicks and hence more business.
Besides local listing for SEO for Small Businesses, [bctt tweet=”great user reviews play an important role in boosting your business’ online reputation.”]
While reviews don’t carry most of the weight when it comes to better ranking, they certainly play a role in helping your customers choose you over your competitors from a given search engine results page.
Content Strategy
When it comes to ranking higher in search engines, [bctt tweet=”Content Strategy for Small Businesses plays a more significant role than any other single factor.”]
If your content does not have the right keywords people will be using to search for your business, you might end up with very little traffic. If your content is not providing people with a solution to their people, lacks substance or is not unique enough, you are not giving people a good enough reason to stay on your website.
Additionally, your content needs to be fresh in terms of what’s trending. If a certain keyword suddenly becomes popular, having content on that topic in a way that it’s relevant to your business, might help you rank on the first page for days or even weeks.
Harness Social
If you are using Social Media for Small Business, you should know that [bctt tweet=”search engines indexes content that is valuable for the searchers, including the one found on social media channels.”] Be it a relevant tweet about your business or an informational post you shared from your own blog, if it’s well optimised it will appear in search results.
Additionally, customers are doing a lot of searches from within the social media channels, making channels like Facebook and YouTube search engines of their own.
Hence it makes sense to [bctt tweet=”optimise your social media posts for search engines and naturally build more links and authenticity to rank higher.”]
Conclusion
If you are struggling to make your own place in the cluttered online landscape, SEO for small businesses could be the very thing to outperform your competitors.
As a rule of thumb, [bctt tweet=”businesses need to make sure their website complies with the latest SEO standards.”] A lot of things come together to make your business website actually work for you! Search engines are rewarding businesses that are complying with its laid out set of guidelines.
[bctt tweet=”Are you a running a small Trades Services Business and want your website to rank higher in search results?”] We can help!At solomoIT, we are a tech savvy team of professionals abreast with technical side as well as the customer side of search engine optimisation for small business! If you think your Trades Services Business can benefit from increasing its organic reach, feel free to talk to us and we’ll me more than happy to help a search engine optimisation strategy that’s in line with your online marketing goals.