As a carpet cleaner, you’ve probably faced a lot of hurdles while attracting customers. The competition can be tough, with so many companies already in the market competing over online presence, customer reviews and marketing strategies.
This article can help you up your game in carpet cleaning SEO.
What Is Local Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?
Internet search has predominantly replaced the Yellow Pages. Earlier, to market your business, all you had to do was to take out an ad in your local Yellow Pages. These days, with everyone rushing to Google for every minute search, your business needs to be among the top five results, if not the top result, when someone searches for anything related to carpet cleaners around your area.
This is where local SEO does its magic. For this, you need to optimize your website and your business listings in the best possible way using the target keywords like your city, state, locality and services you provide.
Why Your Carpet Cleaning Business Needs SEO
Like any other business, a carpet cleaning business also needs to be search engine optimized. Carpet cleaning SEO can help your business rank higher than your competitors’, thus attracting more prospective customers.
To maximize your prospects, you need to aspire to rank among the top few results when someone searches for a carpet cleaner in your area on Google.
What Are the Local Ranking Factors?
The ranking of your business depends on several factors. The most crucial among them are the following:
Google My Business
This is a brief summary of your business that appears in Google Maps. This includes your business location, contact details, work hours, business description, website and business category.
To improve your Google My Business page, ensure the correctness and completeness of all the details. Most importantly, make sure that you’ve chosen the right business category.
On-page optimization
This is the overall quality of SEO on your website landing pages. By using the right keywords on your website pages and ensuring that the keywords are relevant to your site will improve your domain authority. Google considers websites with higher domain authority as more reliable and hence rank them higher in the search results.
Try to fill your website with genuine, informative, quality content instead of just cramming in the keywords to increase your domain authority.
Google Reviews
Google allows its users to review local businesses and the cumulative ratings of your business can make or break your carpet cleaning SEO strategy.
Request your customers to review your business on Google to improve on this. More and more fresh reviews can help you rank higher than your competitors.
Backlinks
Backlinks are links in external sources that lead to your website. The higher domain authority of the external website and the more people clicking on the link improves the ranking of your business. Getting backlinks can be tough, but it truly helps in carpet cleaning focused SEO.
Determine Your Keywords
To determine the keywords to target, you need to think like a customer. What search terms would you use while looking for carpet cleaning services? Some generic keywords could be ‘carpet cleaner near me’ or ‘rug cleaning service’.
Make a list of these keywords and open a Google Ads account. A Google Ads account is free unless you plan to run paid ad campaigns for your business.
In Google Ads, you have the Keyword Planner tool where you can research keywords. Just put in the keywords you’ve chosen and your location to get a long list of related keywords that people in your area use. You can even see the number of people using these keywords!
Next, collect a few keywords from this list that are most applicable to your business and now you’ve got a list of the best keywords for carpet cleaning SEO.
Optimize Your Keywords
Once you’ve determined what keywords you want to target, use them on your website pages and your Google My Business page. When prospective customers look for those keywords and find them on your page, they are more likely to contact you for your services. Try to use keywords in the titles, headings, sub-headings and meta tags of your pages, with only 1-2 keywords focused on a page.
Request Reviews
Google reviews are available on your Google My Business page. If you have more reviews coming in regularly, it increases the credibility of your business, making Google rank it higher than that of your competitors.
Also, prospective customers can go through these reviews before contacting you. More recent reviews can convince people to approach you more often.
Build Citations and Links
Citations are listings of your website in reliable online directories. These include the Chamber of Commerce website, Google My Business, Facebook Business page, yellowpages.com and even industry-specific directories. Ensure that your information is up to date on all listings.
In-bound links to your website from websites of higher authority can really improve your ranking. Try to build professional relationships with other companies or websites that could link your business on their website. These could be house cleaning services or even home-improvement blogs.
Tracking Your Results
While a lot of national and international companies can take a lot of time to improve their online presence, as a local business, it is a lot easier. With just local competitors to worry about, you can get to the top results within a month or two! To track your results, you can use Google Search Console and Google Analytics.
Google Search Console can show you the rank of your website pages based on various keywords. Use this information to know more about how well you’ve optimized your keywords and then tweak your website pages if necessary.
Google Analytics shows you the traffic on your website and the various sources that lead people to your website. You can even configure it to track conversions of site visits to booking a service.
Final Note
With so many competitors around, it is necessary to build your online presence and market yourself. Working on your SEO can truly help your business stand out among the rest.
Hopefully, this article helped you understand SEO better and also helped improve your carpet cleaning SEO strategy for your business.