Getting your local business to rank online in front of the right people is easier said than done. This is especially true for home service businesses that serve multiple service areas. You might’ve heard of local SEO but noticed that some of the strategies don’t apply to your business because you don’t have only one location or address and instead serve multiple cities.
Of course, you still want to make sure the traffic you’re driving to your site is coming from consumers in your local area who can actually hire you. When someone searches for “HVAC repair near me” or “plumbing services near me,” you need to be at the top of that list. But how can you do that?
In this article, we’re going to cover how to do that using local SEO strategies that are specifically tailored for your service-area-based home service business.
Service-Area-Based Local SEO Strategies
1. Create service area pages on your website.
For search engines or maps to pull up your business in local searches, you don’t actually need a physical address. The first step in optimizing your site for your local area is to tell search engines what areas you service. How?
By creating service area pages (SAPs) on your website. A SAP is a dedicated page for each city in your service area that talks about what you do, your value proposition, and then includes a call to action (CTA) to get in touch. Not only will you create SAPs, but you’ll also want to link to them on your homepage (hello, internal linking).
What does this look like in action? Below is a screenshot of the home page for our client, EZ Flow Plumbing. You’ll notice there is an “Areas We Serve” section on the home page navigation, with a dropdown of the top cities they service.
Now, when you click on one of the cities, they have the following information available:
You might notice that this strategy is a combination of content marketing (using keywords on your website to signal to Google what you do and where you do it), and landing pages (which act as stand-alone pages with one CTA).
The goal is that when someone types in a search like “plumber chandler az” your service area page ranks high enough to serve as a landing page for that person. Going back to the example of Scorpion’s client, the image below shows how EZ Flow Plumbing shows up on a Google results page for a plumber in a city they serve.
We recommend creating a service area page for each city you work in.
However, creating them isn’t the only step. These pages also need to be SEO-optimized for each specific city. This requires conducting keyword research by location (Pro Tip: Google Trends helps with this).
Then, you need to write content that is informative and engaging, similar to the type of content you might include on your home page. Again, this would be information on what your business does, going over the type of services you offer, the benefits of choosing your company, and the value you provide in hopes of motivating the visitor to take the next steps and convert (meaning, give you a call for an estimate).
An important call out here: The content on these pages needs to be unique for every city page. It cannot be repeated information with only the city name changed out. If you do that, you’ll get penalized on search engines for duplicate content and you’ll have a much harder time ranking on the results pages.
Lastly, you’ll want to make sure the user experience is primed for conversion. This means there’s a CTA on the page, and it’s pointing users to contact you for an estimate.
In addition to SAPs, another way to make sure your prospects know what areas you serve is to list them in the footer of your site linking to each service area page. Again, hello internal linking. Internal linking to these pages is important for building up their SEO juice (credibility, page views, etc).
2. Properly build out your directory listings.
When people are searching for a home service business, they tend to go to directory sites like Yelp, Google, or Thumbtack. We call these directories “aggregator sites” because they give consumers a list of several options. Being present and building out a profile on these sites is an important part of your local SEO strategy.
In fact, 5% of Google Business listing views result in a website click, call, or direction request.
These profiles need to have a defined service area so you show up in the right searches and if you conduct ads on those platforms, they’re targeting the right users.
The first step is to list the aggregator sites that are most important to you. Then, you should go and “claim” your profile on each of those sites. Once you claim your business, you can add your service areas and optimize your profile page for conversion. This would mean making sure you put all the necessary information a prospect might want – services offered, images, location and hours, and contact information.
Sticking with our EZ Flow Plumbing example, the screenshot below shows what their Yelp profile looks like. Notice that it says the profile is claimed and includes services offered, plus images and videos.
Below that, their profile lists hours, and amenities, and features a Q&A section where the business owner answers questions directly from consumers.
This is a great example of what a fully optimized directory listing looks like. Each listing of your site should include:
- Basic business information
- Services offered
- Photos and videos
- Reviews
- Q&A section filled out (if applicable)
- Links to your website
You might be wondering why you need all these elements. Some of this information is for the aggregator site so they know to rank you for certain searches. But it’s also for the user experience. When a prospect is deciding which plumber to use, they’re going to look to make sure you offer the service they need, they’ll look at reviews, and they’ll look at your photos to see the work you’ve done, and get more information on your business. Google recommends including images of your most popular services, managers, and team members.
The Q&A feature on many of these aggregator sites will also impact your rankings. These sites are more likely to rank you highly if you interact with your customers. This means answering their questions and responding to reviews (both positive and negative).
To see if you’ve claimed all the profiles you need, you can use sites like BrightLocal or Moz. And remember: all the information on these sites needs to be consistent (as in, it’s the same information on Yelp as it is on Thumbtack). If it isn’t, then getting your site ranked locally won’t be easy.
If you don’t have an address, that’s okay. Many of these aggregators offer the ability to define a service area instead right when you’re setting it up.
Additionally, it’s important to note that when you’re setting up your profiles, you will get to choose categories and services that your business offers. It’s important to choose correctly and include everything you can so the site has all the information it needs to rank you for a search.
3. Build backlinks for each location.
Having a backlink strategy is important for any business, but especially for service area based ones. Why? Because since Google, or any search engine, doesn’t have an address, they’ll place more importance on the relevance and prominence of your site.
This means you need a good domain authority, and backlinking is one of the tried and true ways to do that. If you could get backlinks to your specific service area pages, you’ll build up more local credibility with search engines.
This might mean reaching out to bloggers who have articles on “best plumbers in chandler az.” Then, they can list your business and link to your service area page.
4. Optimize your listings by getting reviews.
We know that customers look at reviews before deciding which business to hire, and this is especially true for home services businesses because a customer has to trust you to come to their home.
A BrightLocal study even found that transitioning from a 3-star to a 5-star average rating on Google can lead to 25 percent more clicks.
This means you need reviews. How do you get them? Well, besides offering a great customer experience and good customer service, you should ask your customers to review you. You can do this with Scorpion by sending automated emails or texts right after a service is performed, encouraging your customers to leave a review.
Then, you need to respond to your reviews, both positive and negative. This signals your trustworthiness and expertise as a business to search engines but also lets people know that your business is legitimate and not spam (again, especially important for home services because you’re going into someone’s house).
In this day and age, spam might mean fake reviews, multiple listings for the same business, fake businesses, or keyword-stuffed business names. Unfortunately, research by BrightLocal revealed that spam in listings had increased by 59% between 2018 and 2019 and is still increasing. Following the best practices laid out here will help search engines, aggregator sites, and your customers know that you aren’t a spam business.
5. Define a content strategy that’s optimized for your service areas.
At the beginning of this article, we talked about building out service area pages. That is one component of a content strategy that you can implement to optimize your site for specific locations.
Going back to those SAPs, the page should be optimized for the specific city, meaning the city is listed in your URL, title tags, meta description, throughout the content, and in the headers on the page. All of this acts as a signal to search engines that you should show up for location-specific queries around your home services business. Again, the content on these pages should be different for every city.
Now, let’s move on to another aspect of your content strategy: Creating valuable content on your site, like blogs, videos, or even podcasts that are optimized for your locations. In the content you produce, you should use location keywords when you can and when it makes sense to.
All your content should be:
- Valuable content
- Optimized for keywords specific to location
- Not keyword-stuffed content
- Punchy headers that include targeted keywords
- Include schema markup (more on this below)
6. Use schema markup.
An important element of your local SEO, but also the more confusing and jargon-y of the strategies listed here, is to use schema markup.
Okay, so what is schema? Schema is a form of structured data that was created by all the major search engines in 2011. It helps search engines crawl your site and comprehend a landing page so they can deliver relevant content in the SERPs. The data is often referred to as rich results.
To use this, you’ll need to go to schema.org and use the markup available. This enables a landing page to be eligible for rich results.
First, you’ll need to select the best schema.org category for your business type. This would be plumber, HVAC, or electrician. Then, you’ll need these schema properties:
- Url: The URL of the associated landing page.
- Name: Name of the business.
- OpeningHours: Opening and closing hours of a business.
- Telephone: Contact telephone number for the business.
- Image: This can be any relevant image file on your landing page. It is recommended to use a storefront image if that’s available.
- Logo: This should be a link to your business logo image.
- Address: The business address (if you have one) which should be visible on the landing page.
- Geo: This is the geo-coordinates of your business location.
- AreaServed: It is recommended to use a zipcode for this schema property.
- MainContentOfPage: Main body content of your landing page.
Other common schema properties are:
- Review: A review of your local business.
- AggregrateRating: The overall rating, based on a collection of reviews or ratings, of the item. Make sure to follow Google’s rules on Review Rich Results on this.
- FAQPage: If you have a FAQ page it is imperative to add this specialty schema. Make sure to follow Google’s rules and guidelines.
- AlternateName: Businesses commonly have related names e.g. Acme Stores vs. Acme Inc. The alternateName property marks up other well-known corporate name variations (including abbreviations).
- SameAs: This is a reference to a 3rd party websites that are related to the website’s identity i.e. Facebook pages, Youtube Channel pages, Wikipedia pages, etc.
- HasMap: A URL to the map of your local business.
- Breadcrumb: This schema marks up the existing breadcrumb navigation structure on your website. This schema is highly recommended because it often appears in the SERPS as a rich result.
- PriceRange: The price range of the business, for example, $$$.
Once you’ve updated your schema data, you’ll want to validate it, which you can do on schema.org. It will show you errors and warnings on your data, so you can test data before it’s enabled on your site as well.
7. Optimize your local services ads.
Local services ads are paid advertisements that appear at the top of Google search results for a local business search. This means when someone types in “plumber salt lake city,” your ad will be placed along with all the other organic results that are included on the map, even though you don’t have a specific address.
They’re important for local businesses because they help you pay per lead instead of per click. You only pay if someone contacts you after clicking on the ad.
Implementing these types of ads helps service area based businesses because they will take into account the service area, not the address of your business.
Below is a screenshot of what LSAs look like in action. You’ll notice that besides the business information, it includes the service area the searcher used for this search. This search was “plumbers salt lake city.”
Local SEO for Multiple Service Areas Requires a Different Strategy
Local SEO is so important, but the strategies you use for a multiple service area business are slightly different than a company that has an address. With a comprehensive strategy, you can use local SEO whether you have an address or not.
There’s no reason for you to shoulder the burden of digital marketing alone. With Scorpion’s team at your side, you can tap into our resources to accomplish your goals. Contact Scorpion today to begin attracting more customers to your home service business.