When it comes to preparing your home-service business for digital marketing, it’s all about not overcomplicating things. It’s ok to use a guide, and we’re here to help you.
Digital marketing is an extremely successful toolbox. Sure, there can be 50 different tools in your digital marketing box; however, everyone knows that you should always keep a hammer…
What exactly is a hammer for digital marketing? Well, it’s your website, as you can’t get anywhere without a place to market yourself.
It’s essential to know where you’re going and how you will do it when it comes to all aspects of digital marketing, but it all begins with a foundation.
Here are a few things to consider when starting your website:
This leads to later tasks as well when you start to build out the rest of your resources, but we’ll go over that later.
It’s important to know that your website does not have to be the most aesthetic or the most amazing website, as long as it includes these seven major things:
Yes, we gave you eight major things. If you can hit all of these marks, then your website is already looking good for the next step. Here are a few more marketing tricks to help you out.
Up next! Get your brand and name on different platforms, and as many of them as you can, without overwhelming yourself. The easiest way to start is Google My Business. AKA starting your Local SEO.
To start:
Next, if you’re looking to maximize your exposure, you can start covering social media and other sources such as Yelp.
“We can’t stress the fact that you need multiple platforms to advertise your business. Putting all of your eggs in one basket into SEO or Google Ads will lack lustre in the results department. We manage 30+ contractor accounts and always have them set up with Facebook/Meta Ads, Google Ads, LSAds (if applicable), a good looking website, Google maps listing, and location service pages for SEO.” - Chrispien from Blue Sky Advertisement
One of the most important things to all digital marketing, if not the most important, is SEO optimization. There are three different forms of SEO optimization within the basics; you should cover them all when you can. Ranking from easiest to hardest:
On-Page SEO: On-page SEO is anything you can physically see while scrolling through a website. From the images to the buttons to the copywriting, all of that is On-Page SEO.
Off-Page SEO: Off-page SEO is slightly more complicated and might cost more over time. However, this does not mean you can’t cover what you CAN do, such as blogs, guest blogging, and certain backlinks.
Not all backlinks are free, but they are a must. A backlink is any place outside your website that brings people to your website. The simplest form are backlinks that come from blog links or even directories such as Yelp.
Technical SEO: This is one of the less important, but don’t dismay it: technical SEO focuses on speeding up your site and ensuring a higher standard of UX (user experience). It can also include schema markup (keywords within search code) and general accessibility.
These three forms of SEO will get you and your business where it needs to be, putting you on the right track for the next steps in your journey.
Don’t be afraid to post anything that comes up.
Whether it’s a job you’ve completed, a recent promotion, or a fun family or team moment that might’ve happened. However, make sure that when it comes to promotional or salesy content, it only covers around 10-20% of what you post.
Your content should generally be 80% informational and educational and around 20% entertaining and promotional. This does not mean you can’t make your educational content equally entertaining.
The top 3 social media platforms we recommend to advertise on as a home service business are:
Since social media has no barrier to entry, many new businesses tend to flock to it. Unfortunately, they account for about 5 to 10% of the leads of most of the accounts we manage.
We still highly recommend putting more time and effort into Local SEO, SEO, and Paid Media to get the ROI you want.
The world of Paid advertising is extremely vast, full of incorrect information, and misleading guides that tell you how to succeed in google ads in 2018, when it’s 2024.
When starting Paid Advertising, it’s important to understand two ways that you can tackle these issues:
Now, these two options are all based on three principles: Time, money, and stress.
Paid advertising saves you time and can potentially save you money and stress.
Learning to do it yourself takes time and may potentially stress you out if you don’t know what you’re doing. However, you’re not paying for an agency to do it for you.
Both options have benefits and negatives. However, we advise finding someone you trust to do the job, or ONLY IF you have plenty of spare time, learning Google advertising and only Google ads.
If you try to spill your time vault into every single form of paid advertising, your glass will break.
Realistically, you only have three options for paid media as a home service company:
Each one of these has different use cases and has to be run in a different way to achieve success.
Local Service Ads are the easiest to set up. You must go through the background check process and ensure your niche is listed in the categories they allow.
They are the ads that show up at the top of the page, saying “Google Verified,” and they are phone-only ads.
You pay per phone call lead. It's simple, but it's not cheap.
Google Ads is based on search-intent while facebook/meta ads are based on interaction/engagement and you usually pay per 100 impressions.
Google Ads is really good for targeting “buying intent” traffic such as the “excavation contractor near me” types of keywords.
Facebook/Meta Ads are very good at targeting the middle-funnel keywords such as “How much does excavation cost for xxx”. It also is very good for branding purposes and getting eyes on your company. This does not mean that you can not target the “buying-intent” keywords, just Google Ads on average are better at this.
We highly recommend making a single page landing page for your paid-media campaigns because:
Now, you are on the right track to starting your local service business with Digital Marketing. You may encounter roadblocks along the way, but with all the information available on the Internet nowadays, you can establish a more sustainable lead generation system.
It may seem like a lot of steps to get going, but SEO takes some time, and getting reviews for your GMB account is always something you can do to generate leads and get your business the awareness it deserves!
With all of these steps, you are bound to generate local leads that will provide for you and your family!