If you’ve spent any time looking into online marketing strategies for your pest control company, you’ve probably heard the term “SEO” quite a bit. Effective SEO can improve your website’s positioning in the search results, help you land more clients, and generate more profit for your company.
While having a basic knowledge of how SEO works is helpful, understanding what successful SEO looks like specifically in the pest control industry is even more important. So what is SEO and how does it apply for pest control? Let’s take a look.
What is SEO and what does it look like for pest control?
SEO, or search engine optimization, is a set of strategies designed to improve a website’s appearance in search engine results. How well your website is optimized is a large determinant of how many of your target customers can actually find you.
The pest control industry is unique because generally, your target customers are local to your area. This means that while the quantity of users who find your website matters, it’s even more important that the right users land on your website. Effective SEO for pest control is about ensuring that your local target customers can find you and that your website ranks highly for queries that local customers would likely search for, such as:
- “Pest control company near me”
- “Bed bug problem in my town”
- “Exterminator near me”
- “Best exterminator in my area”
Best Practices for Pest Control SEO
Let’s take a look at some of the best ways to improve your pest control company’s SEO:
Create a SMART Pest Control Website
First, the effectiveness of your website is crucial to your pest control company’s success with SEO. Your website needs to do more than look professional–it needs to be optimized specifically for local search. Your website should be an experience for your customers that ultimately helps convert them into clients. So how can you create a website that is optimized for local search? Here’s how to start:
Create a site plan
One of the most important aspects of developing a SMART pest control website is designing the structure. The structure should be readable and easy to navigate not only for Google, but for your users too. Here are some things to think about when planning your site’s structure:
- Mobile version: When creating your website, don’t forget to think about accessibility for users on mobile devices. The desktop version of a website does not automatically transfer to the same experience on a mobile device, so when building your website, make sure you have an easy-to-navigate mobile version.
- Content engagement: One of your most important goals for your website should be to create engaging content that users will find valuable. Carefully consider your target customers’ pain points and common questions to produce relevant content.
- Create separate pages for each topic: The more specifically your content matches a user’s query, the more likely it is that Google will choose your website as one of the top search results. This is why it’s important to create separate pages that address specific topics. For example, website pages that target specific locations, such as cities and neighborhoods in your area, as well as specific pests within those areas, are more likely to be relevant to a local user’s search query than a general page on a specific pest.
Understand your target audience
To create a website specifically geared towards local users, you need to understand what your typical target user looks like. What are their pain points and target pests, and what information would be most valuable to them? Create buyer personas, or detailed descriptions of what your target customer would look like. Thoroughly researching and understanding your audience will help you create an experience that will appeal to them.
Make it easy to contact you
When creating your pest control website, carefully consider where your contact information should be (Hint: it should be readily visible on every page). Avoid forcing users to click through various pages just to contact you, and instead, focus on making it as easy as possible.
Submit a Sitemap
For your website to be successful in the SERPs, Google needs to be able to understand your content in order to recognize it as a relevant source to respond to a user’s search query. But how can you ensure that Google is reading your site the way you intend it to? This is where sitemaps come into play.
A sitemap is a document you can share with Google that explains how your website is structured. You can include information about the site pages within your website, the content they contain, and how they work together. Google then uses the sitemap as background information in order to crawl your website more effectively.
Improve Your Pest Control Company’s SEO Today
When properly understood, SEO can be one of the most effective tools you have for marketing your pest control company. Although it requires hard work, effort, and properly understanding how SEO applies to the pest control industry, the long term growth you’ll achieve for your company will be more than worth it.
For more information about developing an SEO strategy for your pest control company, schedule a free pest control marketing assessment.
