SEO for Contractors
Use The Best SEO Company For
Search Engine Optimization
Do You Need More Phone Calls? More Sales Leads? More Customers? Digital Horsepower Is The Agency That Can Help You Accomplish This All – We Are One Of The Best SEO Companies For Contractors Of All Types.
Did you know that over 90% of online experiences begin with a search engine, and over 95% of people find local businesses via online searches?
Is your company visible on the first page of the search engines when consumers are looking for your services?
If not, your competitors are getting ALL of these calls – NOT you. But you can change that.
Regardless of what type of contractor you are, whether you focus on HVAC, Remodeling, Concrete, etc…A strong and well executed SEO campaign needs to be a significant element of your overall marketing strategy. There is no other marketing that can put you front and center in front of a prospect at the exact moment that they are looking for the services that you can offer them!
Take this opportunity to learn about how Digital Horsepower can provide a well-designed, researched, and executed local SEO campaign. We provide full service local SEO campaigns that make your phones ring!
Ready to have a conversation?
How Can A Local SEO Campaign Make My Phones Ring?
What Is Local SEO
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) involves curating great content on your website that when someone utilizes a search engine to find something that is highly relevant to the said content, your website ranks as one of the first results for what that web visitor was searching for.
In order for this to happen successfully, you need to have a website that has been designed and built in such a fashion that the search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo can crawl it very easily, to index the content that you have. This is absolutely the most important part of ANY local SEO campaign.
Some of the relevant structural issues of your website center around fast page load speeds, using a secure certificate (SSL), and of course, with most search traffic now coming from smartphones and tablets, it needs to be well optimized for all mobile devices.
Local citations are also important. These include web properties like Google My Business, Yelp, YP, Facebook, and more! You need to make sure that your business information is the same across all of them, and that these listings are constantly optimized and updated. These play a very big part of the search engines understanding WHERE your service areas are, and are crucial to any local SEO campaign!
Of course, it goes without saying that you also need great content, and lots of it! You want to make sure that you have very well written content that is not only keyword optimized, but is unique, and matches up very well with what people are searching for.
Especially with the last few updates from Google, you need to have strong backlinks from other websites. These are links from other trusted and credible websites that give the search engines an indication that your website has excellent, credible, and important content on it.
Here is how we do it! If you want to read more in-depth information, feel free to read our blog as well!
How Do We Manage And Execute Local SEO Campaigns?
Companies who focus on local SEO such as Digital Horsepower offer fully managed local SEO campaigns. What this means is that we take care of everything.
This includes the constant monitoring and tweaking of all facets of your campaign including keywords, content, meta titles, monitoring your competitors, analytics, conversion date, and more.
We first analyze your search engine rankings, and that of 4-5 of your main competitors in your market. When doing this, we thoroughly analyze where you rank against them, what search terms you rank for (and don’t), and the same on your competitors websites. This gives us a tremendous amount of insight because we can see exactly what you are ranking for (and are not), and the same of your competitors.
We then will dive into the keywords that people are searching within your market to find the services that you offer. This will create our roadmap for the next step…
At this point, we address all of your “on-page” items such as optimizing your meta titles, meta descriptions, site structure, content, and general navigation. These are all very critical steps because without a “well-oiled” website, it isn’t going to move like we need it to, regardless of what we do offsite.
Now we are ready to also shore up all of the local citations (making sure that all of the major directories that are well trusted by the search engines all have your business listed exactly the same way, and with 100% accurate content). We are now ready to create a very actionable local SEO plan to start ranking your website the way it should be.
We need to make sure that each of your website pages load very quickly. Believe it or not, this is a ranking factor with Google. They are all about their user experience, and one of the major items that are of the most importance to them is how fast the search result that they click on loads. The general rule of thumb for page load speed is that it needs to load in 2 seconds or less.
We also need to make sure that there is an SSL (Secure Certificate) loaded on your site. It has been proven to not only increase your search engine rankings, but also your CTR (Click Through Rate). This is defined by the percentage of people who see your result in a SERP (Search Engine Results Page) and actually click it.
It is very important that your website is also very well optimized to display and navigate flawlessly on mobile devices. Mobile has taken over desktop by a mile when it comes to searches, so if your website is not optimized for mobile, you are going to get left behind, as Google is now penalizing websites that are not optimized for smartphones and tablets.
It is also important to create a thorough edit of your websites structure and all of the code to make sure that everything works properly, and fast.
Edit the content and make sure that your existing website pages are optimized for the best keywords.
Insure that you have all the right CTA’s (Calls To Action) such as the size and placement of your phone numbers, web forms, live chat widgets are all placed and designed with best practices. You also need to make sure that any internal links are set-up correctly and help provide the smoothest user experience possible. All of these things will help your website convert website visitors in to customers, so every one of them is equally important.
Develop new website content that is well optimized to pull in relevant search traffic. This content needs to have high relevancy to the search terms that people are using when searching for the services that you offer them, in your metro area.
Produce great videos that re also well optimized in the search engines. Consumers and search engines alike love well produced videos! Use this to your advantage to add additional assets that can rank in the search engines, and also produce new customer leads & sales!
The last step in the content creation process is to optimize this content for new devices such as Alexa, and Google Home. Additionally, it is important to optimize for voice searches from smartphones, as these are gaining strong popularity now too!
Find and update the 70+ local directories that are the most trusted by the search engines, with the most accurate and consistent information about your business. Some of these include Yahoo Local, Bing Business Listings, Yelp, Facebook, Angie’s List, YP, and more! This helps the search engines understand where your business operates, which is very critical to any local SEO campaign.
If you don’t already have a Google My Business page for your business, you need to create this. Once you do, it needs to be fully optimized. This is the most important local citation that you can have. Add images, a thorough keyword optimized description of your business, address or service area, your correct phone number, business hours, and more.
Do you have a Facebook page for your business? You need one. And make sure that you populate it with content such as your correct business name, address, phone number, images, and more. Every piece of information that you can add to these local citations will help the search engines understand where you do business.
We utilize full dynamic call tracking in all of our local SEO campaigns. We feel that it is important to be able to track every call, and every dollar of revenue that you generate from your local SEO campaign. You need to know where your customers are coming from, and not just that, but what online sources are driving that traffic.
Our reporting suite integrates with your Google Analytics, Google My Business, and Google Search Console accounts to give us the most accurate, and up-to-date information. In addition, we integrate with some of the most advanced local SEO tools available that allow us to dig much deeper into your website data, and optimize it at a very granular level.
Our reporting suite will provide you with monthly reports on every relevant metric of your local SEO campaign. We will know the data about every visitor who comes to your website including mobile vs. desktop, what pages they visited, and what actions they took. You will also have direct login access to this reporting suite to monitor your local SEO results as well.
We closely monitor each of your keywords to follow their daily rankings. We also monitor the keywords that your competitors rank for so that we can see not only their current rankings, but also dissect exactly what they are doing to rank for them, and thus adjusting our strategy.
Another thing that we monitor closely is our call tracking. When someone calls you from your website, we look for the keyword that they searched to come across your website so that we can further optimize your campaign for efficiency.
Utilizing the data that we see on your campaign every day to adjust and modify our strategy for you, so your local SEO campaign can run as efficiently as possible.
Should You Hire A Local SEO Company?
Digital Horsepower handles all of the daily monitoring your local SEO campaign so that you can focus on running your business.
As busy as you are running your business every day, it is likely that you can’t find the time to really analyze your local SEO campaign every day. Between looking at all of the data, analyzing all of your user interactions, studying traffic patterns, etc…It is a lot to handle, for sure.
You should be focused on fielding sales calls, managing your staff, getting more jobs booked, and of course collecting payment for those jobs. As such, if you can answer yes to most of these questions, that means your business can definitely benefit from a fully managed local SEO campaign:
- Would you like to grow your business significantly this year?
- Do you know exactly how much business your website itself is bringing in each month?
- Are you looking to add to your current services? Perhaps grow certain segments of your business?
- You want to differentiate your business from your competitors in your local market?
- Is it important to you to out rank your direct competitors in your service areas?
How Much Do Real SEO Services Cost?
This is the $64,000 question. And truthfully, there isn’t any “one size fits all” answer. It is like asking, “How much is a new car?” To answer this correctly, we first need to analyze your existing website, your local competitors, and the local landscape for your service offerings. Let’s see if we can break it down in a way that makes more sense.
First of all, let’s compare apples to apples. There are several offshore organizations that call themselves SEO agencies. Please understand though, that English is not their native language, which in most cases has a very significant effect on your content that they write. Many of these “agencies” tell you they can “drive your website to the front page of Google” for $400-500/month…
What they don’t tell you is the Black Hat techniques that they use to do it, and when you get slapped with a Google penalty, or even worse, are you are completely de-indexed by Google and your site is wiped out completely in their search engine, how much did you just lose?
Additionally, in almost every case that we have seen involving these offshore agencies, there are several very obvious mistakes in their writing, website structures, and their skills. You simply cannot go to a $5.99 buffet and expect a steak that is on the same level of a four star steakhouse. Just like your $12,000 Chevy Volt isn’t going to have the same creature comfort of your new $90,000 Mercedes S550, either. If you look at a local SEO campaign as an expense, instead of an investment, that like any other investment that you make, you expect a return on, then you need to change your thinking.
If you run a television advertising campaign that costs you $10,000, is that an expense, or do you expect to generate $50,000-$75,000 in revenue from it? A well designed, and well managed local SEO campaign works the same way. Once you begin a local SEO campaign, you should expect to earn a significant return on that investment.
Speaking for our own offerings, depending on your industry and how competitive it is on the web, and the same for your local area, there is a range. In some cases, we can really help you move the needle with a budget of as little as $1000/month. But if you are in a top 10 market and want to dominate for all of your services and are very aggressive, you can easily spend $4000-$5000/month, or more. It all comes down to the amount of work that we have to do to meet your objectives.
Perhaps if you are an HVAC contractor in a big market like Los Angeles, instead of trying to dominate every other HVAC contractor there, why not start a very targeted campaign on a certain territory, spend $2000-$3000/month, get 50-100 calls from your local SEO campaign, make some money, and then evaluate your strategy to grow from there? We have seen that exact scenario play out for an HVAC contractor and in 3 months, they spent $7500 on SEO in total, but offset that with $35,000 in revenue just from the calls they received from their local SEO campaign. Remember that a well-managed local SEO campaign seasons like a fine wine, too. The longer it runs, the better and better it gets…
What ultimately matters when you are judging the success of your local SEO campaign is the ROI (Return On Investment). If you spend $2500/month on local SEO for example, but you can track $20,000+ in monthluy revenue specifically from your local SEO campaign, then uyou are doing well. What if you track $30,000/month in revenue from it? That is a 12-to-1 return. 1200%!
There is an old saying that you only get out of something what you put into it. This holds very true in local SEO. It is a LOT of work…but when you execute it correctly, it can pay significant dividends for a very, very long time.
Also – If you decide to hire one of these offshore “agencies” that we spoke of earlier, be very, very careful. First of all, they are in a different part of the world. It can be very, very difficult to hold them accountable if they do harm to your website, and/or business as a result.
Another major concern: If they include a “free” website, you likely are just going to end up with a basic run-of-the-mill website, or even worse. It can have a bunch of duplicate content (which will certainly kill your rankings) and if you stop paying them, then poof! Your website goes away…
What SEO Success Looks Like
Inreased Rankings
More organic traffic
Increased Organic Traffic
More calls/web forms
Inreased Calls/Web Forms
Inreased sales
Inreased sales
Inreased revenue
The general rule of thumb is that you will see significant progress in 3-4 months. In many cases, we are able to start generating enough calls with your local SEO campaign for you to generate enough new revenue to allow your campaign to start paying for itself. That is the benchmark that we shoot for.
If you are in a highly competitive industry, for example, a remodeling contractor in a city like Dallas, TX, and you are working with a small budget of say, $1500/per month…It can take six to nine months in some cases, to see real results because you are competing with a lot of well-established remodeling contractors that have been engaged in local SEO for a while. Can they be beaten? Absolutely. But you need to have a realistic expectation and we can help you understand that once we have a chat.