Reputation management encompasses multiple marketing aspects of your plumbing company, including reviews, content creation, and social media. In today’s podcast, Jason and Nolen dig into the subject and explore how plumbing contractors can make their reviews, service pages, and city pages work much harder for their businesses.
If you’ve struggled to improve your local rankings, even if your company has plenty of reviews, be sure to listen in!
Be on the Lookout for These Key Points:
Do reviews alone improve my local search engine rankings?
Should new plumbers focus on reputation management or social media marketing?
Is there a way to coordinate reviews across different platforms?
Are city pages worthwhile?
Managing Your Company Reputation
In a way, reputation management revolves more around the perception of your plumbing company than anything else. Along with the obvious consumer perceptions created through reviews, your site’s graphic design, and navigation, there’s another crucial aspect that all too many plumbers forget about. How does Google perceive your business?
In the past, we’ve talked about the crucial E-A-T factors: expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. When Google spiders (re-examines) an existing plumbing contractor website, it attempts to identify data elements showing that your site, content creators, and business possess these qualities.
Where Google Looks for E-A-T Factors
For Expertise: Content creator bios, content organization, and quality.
For Authoritativeness: Content, creator bios, reference sites, keywords, & web design.
For Trustworthiness: Reviews, geo-tags, check-ins, images, navigation, and link profiles.
These character traits impact both Google and customer perception of your business. Of course, that also means you can expect two-fold benefits when you nail all three elements! Below, we’ll dig into three of the most crucial aspects of reputation management.
Review Management
Reviews can make or break a plumbing business. While almost any plumber could tell you they need reviews, many don’t know how to collect them effectively or what to do with them once they start pouring in. While they certainly contribute to a company’s perceived trustworthiness, reviews don’t automatically cause your site to rank higher on google.
So how can you get the greatest value from your customer testimonies and all those 5-star ratings? First, make sure your reviews come from a variety of sources. In other words, don’t put your eggs exclusively in Google Reviews, Facebook, or Angie’s List. While Google once prioritized recommendations through its own platform, the search engine now prefers a more diverse collection from multiple sources.
Second, be sure to take time to display customer reviews on your website! Not only does this please Google, but potential customers will also feel more confident about using your services. It may take a bit of research to find a widget that presents reviews in a way that matches your tastes.
At the Plumbing Webmasters, our team uses our special platform, DataPins, which conveniently pulls recommendations from Facebook, Google, and other top providers.
Site Optimization – Navigation & Service Structure
Continued site optimization also impacts your reputation management. After all, few things affect a customer’s first impression of your company more than your website design. Will they have a convenient time of browsing your services when they land on your homepage, or will they get frustrated and leave?
We’ve encountered many plumbers over the years who ask why their site isn’t performing well, only for our experts to learn their design was creating a terrible user experience.
Simplistic, concise navigation makes for the best visitor interaction. That’s why many of the most successful plumbing contractor websites simply rely on a few service categories to showcase their work. This simplistic navigation also makes it easy for Google to explore your website and identify your key services.
Content Creation
Of course, professional content also impacts your company’s reputation too! Not only does the quality of the material affect Google’s perception of your business, but the quantity alsoaffects your ratings as well. Companies that release new content on a regular basis tend to earn better rankings in the long run.
What Types of Content Can You Use?
Blogs
Podcasts
Videos
Images
Guides
Infographics
and More!
Two Ways to Enhance Reputation & Rank Up
As we’ve mentioned, our Plumbing Webmasters team utilizes our in-house tool to collect reviews. DataPins allows customers to leave reviews directly on their preferred platform (Google, Facebook, etc.) on a client’s website. It also collects reviews left on those platforms and citation services.
While that cross-platform functionality certainly offers convenient reputation management,the really exciting benefit of DataPins is geo-tagging! When a customer receives a request for a review (usually via text), their submission gets tagged on Google Maps without revealing their exact address. Google loves this input and ranks up websites that display them.
Our reviews platform also allows plumbing professionals to check in on a job site, provide a tag of the service they’ve provided, and even post pictures of the work they completed. Again, this information gets geo-tagged in Google Maps and displayed on that client’s related service page and city page.
Even if each plumbing truck only checks in a few times a day, that leads to dozens of check-ins within a single week! This provides extremely visible proof of your activity to Google, and the search engine greatly rewards the effort.
If you’d like to learn more about the processes behind reputation management or if you’d like additional details about how DataPins can help your business, give us a call. At Plumbing Webmasters, our clients regularly dominate the rankings in local searches. They earn higher traffic volume, stronger user engagement, and better lead generation. We’d love to partner with your plumbing business too.
Lately, we’ve talked with many plumbing companies about highly technical services that marketing agencies try to sell. In today’s podcast, Nolen and Jason talk about the dangers of single-service “cure-all” solutions.
We’ve also provided a short terminology guide to help you understand some of these crucial terms. If you’ve struggled to determine what your plumbing company needs to succeed online, be sure to listen in!
Look Out for These Key Points
Can a singular service improve my rankings online?
Is a low-dollar service package a good deal?
What do these online marketing terms mean?
Confusion Regarding Online Marketing
Explaining concepts and processes to homeowners is a crucial portion of the job for plumbing contractors. Not only do you manage expectations better this way, but you also enable your customers to make informed decisions based on their needs.
Now imagine a homeowner that claims they need a particular service (which you know to be unnecessary) because a shady plumber said so. Naturally, you’d want to guide your client toward the best solution and steer them away from potentially wasteful suggestions.
When it comes to online marketing, plumbing contractors often rest at a significant disadvantage to the professionals within the marketing industry. That’s because marketing experts spend countless hours researching the latest trends in an online search.
Most businesses use this information to serve their current and future clients better. Unfortunately, some marketing companies try to exploit this knowledge gap for their own ends.
That’s where we see the rise in buzzword marketing, promoting a technical service in a way that sensationalizes both the function and the results of the solution. In buzzword marketing, an agency salesman often takes a service out of context with the rest of search engine optimization (SEO), making it difficult to understand its purpose.
Of course, the sales pitch usually comes with dramatic claims of soaring site traffic and customer leads.
Be Careful of Cure-All Solutions
Plumber SEO is influenced by hundreds of different factors. Many rest within the confines of your commercial website and how well it’s optimized for search.
Other external factors include your business’ reviews, the completion of your Google My Business listing, and your social media marketing activities. All of these points contribute towards your overall online marketing success.
If a business struggles with low rankings, slow traffic, and poor lead generation, it’s almost never because of one factor. So when a marketing firm comes along and promotes a singular service to turn everything around, plumbing contractors should automatically be suspicious.
If a company approaches you with a brand new, highly complex solution, take it with a pound of salt!
Taking a Full Health Approach
The most successful (results-producing) marketing companies always examine their clients from a broad point of view first. Our team at the Plumbing Webmasters examines hundreds of data points whenever we take on a new client.
That’s because your search engine marketing (SEM) success depends on your success in several key areas.
Crucial Factors for Success
Factor #1:Your Company Website – Coding, Keywords, Content, and Management
Factor #2:Your Advertising – Adwords PPC Campaigns, Facebook Ads, etc.
Factor #3:Social Media Content – Visitor Experience, Reviews, Response Speed
Factor #4:Citations – Reviews on Google; Listings on Yelp and Angie’s List
Factor #5:Phone and Email – Employee Courtesy, Responsiveness, Organization
Factor #6:Credentials – Licenses and Certifications (Including Their Promotion)
All of these elements contribute to your lead generation and online search rankings. If that seems like too much to handle for your plumbing business, don’t worry! Experienced digital marketing companies have both the time and the experience needed to handle all of these elements (minus the credentials, that’s on you).
Below, we’ve taken some of the big industry buzzwords and provided a brief explanation for each. The next time a marketing company tries to sell you something you don’t need, you’ll have a wonderful surprise waiting for them!
8 Fancy SEO Buzzwords Explained
Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
This broad term encompasses all the activities devoted to promoting your business on Google and other search engines. Practically every element of online marketing falls under SEM.
Another broad term, typically referring to website design and other activities meant to get your site acknowledged, analyzed, and (highly) ranked by Google and other search engines. It can be divided into two categories:
On-site SEO: activities and elements inside of your website meant to improve rankings
Off-site SEO: activities and elements outside of your website meant to drive better site rankings
Keywords / Key Phrases
These are words and phrases intentionally placed inside your site content. Ideally, your content should include words and phrases frequently searched by people in the Google Search Bar.
The search engine identifies these words inside your site and uses them to determine a page’s relevance during a consumer’s search query.
Content
This short but profound term refers to any material created by a business, organization, or individual for the purpose of consumption. This may include written material, videos, infographics, pictures, and more.
In the context of a plumbing website, content usually refers to the material in your service pages, homepage, “Contact Us,” “About Us,” and blog posts.
Content Marketing
This concept made its popular debut over 5 years ago now. It refers to the development and distribution of non-sales-oriented content for the purpose of creating followers. This is why businesses now produce so many guides, top 10 lists, industry FAQs, blog posts, and podcasts (like this one).
While the process takes time and consistent effort, content marketing is designed to grow brand value, enhance rankings, and establish your company as an authority.
The Google Sandbox is an old-school SEO term that refers to either an algorithmic penalty or the confinement and suppression of a search result for violating Google’s guidelines. Despite some disagreement over whether a sandbox ever existed, many believe their websites continue to fall victim to Google’s constraints.
As a digital marketing agency that helps Plumbers succeed online, some ask us about being sandboxed before investing in our service. Our response is the same for everyone. SEO is not the same as it used to be. Before the Penguin algorithm update in 2012, many black hat tactics were exercised regularly by SEO agencies.
When Google started to drop the hammer on websites that benefited from them, terms like sandbox were thrown around quite often. Things like hidden text and 500-word title tags were examples of tactics that became subject to the wrath of Google’s newfound idealism.
Today, penalties are rare. First, most websites that use old-school black hat tactics no longer see benefits. Second, the websites that are “supposed” to be in the top 10 are now usually placed there. So there’s no reason to knock a website down 20 or 30 spots because it was never high enough to warrant consideration in the first place. Second, Google now has a better grasp on ranking websites for their positive qualities.
Things like clean code, schema markup, and quality content can now be interpreted by Google and used as a ranking consideration. Despite these advancements in the search engine algorithm, many plumbers remain frustrated with their rankings or lack thereof. Plumbing Webmasters can help you determine what factors limit your existing website and what can be done to reverse course going forward.
Here are 3 reasons why your plumbing website could be sandboxed:
Hacked Website
If your website has been hacked, a giant red notice will appear to all visitors. Needless to say, this is bad for SEO purposes, which can be why Google would dismiss you from search results. One of Google’s duties is to protect its users from viruses or unsafe web interactions like phishing.
A website that has been flagged for being hacked will never perform well online. Even if some users do reach your website, they won’t stick around. While hacks are not assuredly a “sandbox” penalty, they are unequivocally detrimental to your plumbing company’s web efforts.
Lack of Reviews
Being sandboxed on Google Maps can stem from reviews or lack thereof. While you might have hundreds of reviews on Angie’s List and HomeAdvisor, having zero on Google is a bad look. That’s not to say you get no credit for other reviews but having at least some on Google gives you far more credibility, particularly regarding Google Maps rankings.
Competitors with more reviews than you may rank higher on Maps even if you feel their plumbing services are inferior. They may be horrible at plumbing, but it’s irrelevant if they have a good reputation.
Poor Site Quality
Most ranking problems can be traced back to poor website quality. This can be from the perspective of content, design, and, most commonly, a combination of both. Most plumbers who call us for help have a template website that they mistakenly believe is custom.
These sites are not custom folks. They are templates that have been duplicated repeatedly with slight tweaks to put your logo and contact information up. Google prefers a custom codebase with schema markup to better understand what a website offers. Plumbers should invest in custom.
Is The Google Sandbox a Myth?
The possible “sandbox” penalties we’ve listed can be attributed to a wide range of terms. Not everyone will attribute the problems we noted to a sandbox. The reality is that Google has never confirmed the existence of a sandbox, and because of the paranoia that exists within the SEO industry, it’s just as likely that it is a myth.
What we do know, however, is that certain qualities on a page will influence its ability to rank. What kind of terminology you want to ascribe to such concepts is entirely up to you, but what we know as a digital marketing agency for plumbers is that our clients are successful when they have custom websites optimized for search and coded cleanly with schema markup and mobile usability. There’s really no complicated way to deny it.
As a plumbing contractor, you like to keep your business fairly simple. When a homeowner has a problem with their plumbing system, you explain to them what their options are and how much it will cost them. Web marketing agencies are not as humble.
The vast majority of them behave as if they are on a superior intellectual level to their client base. Just because they know more about search engine optimization does not make them a rocket scientist. Common logic still applies to SEO, just like it does with plumbing and any other kind of service industry. The arrogance of marketing companies in 2019 can be known as web geek cocky.
Marketing Companies vs. The Common Man
It’s part of their schtick to be arrogant. It’s almost like a defensive mechanism. They understand that the work they are doing is nothing special, and so they have to oversell it to make it seem more valuable. You might think that using big words that don’t really mean anything will not impress a plumber or any business owner, for that matter. But people can be swayed by the illusion of expertise.
When marketers appear as if they possess rare knowledge, they are sometimes able to convince a client to buy in. It’s not the fault of the client if they fall for the trick, but it is something that plumbers should be aware of when they are looking for help with website design or SEO.
Marketing is Not Rocket Science
Just like plumbers won’t act as if they are the only person on earth who can perform the service, SEO experts should follow suit. There’s a culture of talking down to clients, especially those who work in the home service industries.
These marketers try to pretend their work is unattainable by the common man. While web design and SEO do take specific skill sets at the end of the day, it is merely a service that a bunch of different companies can offer around the country.
Plumbers Need a Straight Shooter
In an age where plumbers are looked down upon by arrogant fools in the marketing industry, a straight shooter becomes a breath of fresh air. What if someone who could relate to your business challenges was also the person creating and implementing your marketing campaign?
That is the case with Plumbing Webmasters. Owners Nolen & John come from humble beginnings and were once home service providers themselves. They started their own web company after being talked down to with web geek cocky nonsense.
Identifying Web Geek Nonsense
If you are a plumber currently looking for SEO services, there are some red flags you should consider during your research. If a company starts speaking in an empty language (using words that don’t mean anything), you know you’re in trouble. This web geek is probably cocky.
They think they can trick the common man into overspending on services they don’t need. Many such marketers will get you involved in the shell trick scheme, where they take SEO money and use it on PPC. Steer clear of these egomaniacs.
They have done enough damage to the country already. Especially the common hard-working American who is the foundation of our economy.
Plumbing Webmasters: The Exception
Plumbers can relate to the owners here at Plumbing Webmasters because they lived the same experience. Having once been a home service provider company themselves, they transitioned to SEO work because they couldn’t find another company that wasn’t unpretentious.
It’s almost like shopping for a doctor. They are mostly arrogant people who think because they went to medical school that, they are God-like figures. The problem is even more absurd with web geeks, though, because the work is not dependent on a decade of high-level schooling.
At the end of the day, Plumbing Webmasters is a web marketing company run by relatable people. You can trust that our hundreds of clients are enjoying our professional-level design and SEO services without the web geek cocky.
Summary: Nolen of Plumbing Webmasters discusses how plumbers can succeed in 2019 with digital marketing ventures like SEO, Website Design, PPC, Social Media, and more. Having worked with hundreds of plumbing clients, Plumbing Webmasters understands what it takes to rank on top of Google as a local contractor.
SEO is not a one-size-fits-all proposition. One of the most significant distinctions between a website’s ability to optimize quickly is its age. Old websites tend to optimize more rapidly than their newer counterparts.
Why? Because having been on the internet for years (decades in some cases), Google has indexed the website and noted its consistent presence. Therefore, even non-optimized websites with an indexed domain hold value for future plumbing SEO services.
In contrast, brand new plumbing websites take longer to optimize. Since there is no record of their existence on the internet (because it ceased to exist), Google won’t automatically trust it, even if it’s well optimized.
Web admins can’t accelerate tenure without producing an excessive amount of high-quality links, something that is almost impossible to accomplish for a local plumber and may cause penalization. Let’s discuss optimizing old vs. new websites:
Old Websites
Older sites are the easiest to optimize, and they can quickly achieve success through optimization. For example, if your plumbing company has been around since, let’s say, 1999, and has had a cheap website up since, let’s say, 2003, it has a digital tenure of 16 years.
Even if the site was pure trash from an SEO & content standpoint, the representation of your business on a legitimate domain name still holds value.
Once a professional SEO company optimizes your site correctly, you could see significant improvements in as little as 3-4 weeks. The only scenario in which old websites are non-favorable is when they’ve been manually penalized by Google.
However, your site probably does not have a penalty unless you intentionally built spammy links, violating Google’s guidelines.
Let’s go ahead and assume that’s not the case with your company. Here’s why age helps optimization:
Authority
Old domains possess inherent authority because Google indexed these addresses years and sometimes decades earlier. Thus, even if a website failed to live up to proper SEO, its existence within Google’s index is enough to establish a baseline of authority.
Tenure
The age (tenure) of the exact web address influences its ability to optimize. You can check a domain’s tenure by using whois.com, which lists the initial registration date of the website. You can also view its visual history by visiting archive.org.
Trust
Google’s top priority is giving its users trusted search results. So it’s common sense why aged domains would be safer for Google to publish than brand new ones. After all, Google already evaluated every site in its index.
New Websites
Many plumbers don’t have the luxury of optimizing an old website because they are a brand new business or never purchased a domain name. In either case, SEO is far more frustrating and takes longer to work. Still, newer plumbing companies shouldn’t let that discourage them from performing SEO.
There are methods to supplement traffic while you wait the 6+ months for your SEO to kick in properly.
You can target long-tail keywords and low-competition keyphrases to get your website indexed faster. Depending on your company’s location, you may have an easier time ranking for obscure keywords. For example, let’s say you service a city with a population of under 5,000 people.
You can probably rank for a phrase like sump pump repair in city, st sooner than six months in such a scenario. But, of course, more competitive keywords like plumber near me, will take at least six months, if not longer.
You can find a keyword’s difficulty using MOZ, SEMRush, or another similar SEO tool. However, since websites aren’t usually dedicated to sump pump repair, having high-quality internal pages that focus on that topic can rank websites (even very new ones) quickly.
So here are some things to focus on with a new website:
Freshness
Sites with limited tenure should frequently publish new content to build authority on Google. Conversely, sites with little to no content have a more challenging time establishing trust and topical authority within Google’s index. Consider adding new service pages and blog posts each week.
Reputation
Another way to speed up SEO for new websites is by associating your website with a reputable business. You can do so by enhancing your business reputation on online directories like Google My Business, Yelp, and plumbing-related directories.
Supplementation
Try driving traffic to your website from other sources besides organic search. For example, invest in Facebook Ads, share posts on social media, and start an email campaign with a tool like MailChimp or SendinBlue. Then, as more traffic comes through your website, Google may index pages faster.
Meeting in the Middle
Once a new website reaches a certain level of authority, it can compete with older and more previously established domains. The old website’s inherent advantage goes away once the new one sets itself on the same level.
The goal for new plumbing companies is to expedite the process as much as possible. Once you’ve established authority, whether, with a new or old website, you should focus on the following principles to sustain your search rankings.
Content Marketing
As new keywords emerge, it’s your job to produce content that meets your consumer’s needs. For example, a page about cast iron drain repair helps signal specific service offerings to search engines and builds trust among present and future customers.
Likewise, showcasing a recent sump pump repair job is worth sharing on your service and city pages and may increase engagement for your website.
On-Page SEO
It is critical to keep up with Google’s latest algorithm changes and adjust your on-page SEO as necessary. For example, Google recently started using passage indexing which splits sections of your pages and posts into individualized results.
With this in mind, it’s a bright idea to break your content into different sections using headers and tables of contents. You should also build internal links for each new page you publish. For instance, your slab leak repair page should link to your common slab leak causes blog post.
Off-Page SEO
Never stop promoting your brand and company on as many platforms as possible. For example, if a new social media platform emerges or a new plumbing directory, make sure you list your business information on the new website.
Not only can they serve as nofollow links, but they can help your company reach as many eyes as possible. In addition, make sure to continuously generate reviews for your business on as many review platforms as possible.
Schema markup is a boring & technical concept that could put most plumbers to sleep. But once they realize what it can do for their SEO and subsequent business success, they awaken rather quickly. Of course, the tricky part is getting plumbers to buy into the idea that a microdata tag language within HTML coding can directly impact their bottom line.
But bear with us because we’ve tested schema for plumbers extensively over our decade-long management of plumbing contractors’ digital presences and have experienced nothing but an enhancement, success, and competitive advantage. But the technical vocabulary can be tedious, even for web designers.
What is Schema Markup?
Schema is an extra layer of code inserted into web page HTML, labeling pieces of data according to relevance. Schema tells Google what things are. For example:
The name of your company
Which image is your logo
Your company phone #
Yous business address
And much more
What Google Sees
If you use Google’s Chrome browser to surf the web, you can click CTRL+U to bring up the source code. It might look like gibberish to you, mainly if you’ve never studied programming or back-end website design, but it is something that Google’s web crawlers intimately understand. Furthermore, it is how websites communicate with Google, which, as you might imagine, can heavily influence the perceived value of a website and its ultimate position on Google rankings.
So don’t mistake a lack of understanding for lack of importance. Google perceives that code, and that’s what matters. At the same time, most people focus on the front-end of a website (the visual component), but it is far less relevant to organic SEO than the source code. So think of Google crawlers when performing any technical SEO task, which ultimately contributes to higher rankings.
Attractive Websites With Horrific Code Base
It’s natural for the average internet user to focus on the presentation of a website and not its back-end source code. But what if they never see the front-end presentation? Because that’s what happens to thousands and thousands of sites every year. They are buried on search rankings and fail ever to exhibit their good presentation to the masses.
An appealing website can help with conversion rates, closing the deal, and keeping visitors on the site longer (decreasing bounce rate), but it can’t get them there initially. Unfortunately, it’s not uncommon for aesthetically pleasing websites to have a putrid code base that directly impacts business sales. All because of a pathetically atrocious code base behind a nice-looking visual.
Semantic Markup vs. Schema Code
Before schema code was an absolute powerhouse in web design communities, semantic markup was the original version. It still holds value to this day, albeit on a less specific scale. Semantic markup helped Google parcel web elements on a page. For example, it would tell Google this is the header, the body text, the sidebar, the footer, etc.
Of course, this is important for Google to understand, but schema takes it to a whole other level. For instance, schema can say that a business address, company logo, etc. The two methods don’t conflict with one another, but instead, the schema is the natural progression of semantic markups’ original intention. Plumbers should take full advantage of this evolution when designing their company website. In addition, it can have a direct influence on Google’s rank positions.
Semantic Markup: Divides web elements into basic categories
Schema Markup: Denotes specific information within semantic categories
What if My Plumbing Website Already Has Schema?
In our experience, 99% of plumbing websites use template websites before investing in our services. Unfortunately, the lack of success from these websites drives them to pursue a new marketing campaign. But sometimes, these template websites do have schema code. So why does it fail? Because having schema can range from 1-2 schema code blocks to hundreds of thousands.
So while your template website might have fundamental schema code, it does not have the advanced code that Google values. It might tell search engines basic business information, but to compete for the top rankings, you’ll need much more detailed information than that. One great example of advanced schema is aggregate star review ratings which show the 5-star rating of your business. Plumbing Webmasters tracks about 100 types of schema code on a standard client.
Why Does Schema Matter for SEO?
The more Google understands about a website, the more effectively it can market it to consumers. Furthermore, the more revealing a website is about its contents, the more Google can trust that it’s worthy of being ranked on SERPs. Another factor regarding schema & SEO for plumbers is the SERP presentation. We mentioned the appeal of the aggregate star review rating.
When this becomes an extension of your website result on Google SERPs, the click-through rate increases exponentially. Schema helps your site earn trust from Google and effectively markets your services to relevant consumers. In addition, it encourages superior user behavior metrics, which, as we know, are very important for ranking positions. To sum up, schema’s relation to SEO, consider these:
Enhanced SERP Presentation: Users are more likely to click on results with enhanced features
Improved Trust: When Google understands your data, it is more likely to trust it when positioning its ranking
Increased Relevance: When Google knows the specifics of your site, it can market it to relevant users
Schema markup aims to help Google parcel data and effectively promote your website to relevant users. Because of its heavy influence over SEO, it deserves significant attention and resource allocation. We cannot stress enough the importance of this factor for plumbing SEO. With professional designers on staff, we can help you take your web coding to the next level in 2021.
2019 promises to be a big year for plumbers. Check out our SEO for Plumber’s guide if you have not done so already. Today, we will discuss an actionable checklist that every plumbing contractor can utilize to gauge the progress of their web presence and identify points on which improvement is necessary.
As a digital marketing agency working with plumbers for almost a decade, we have the resources at our disposal to put companies in a position to succeed in the online space. The goal for all plumbers is to make more money. The best way to do that is through online lead generation, the majority of which happens via digital marketing campaigns. In this 10 point checklist, we’ll touch on the most critical aspects of SEO:
1) Design
The front end of a website is what most consumers think about once they enter. It’s what most contractors think about when evaluating their plumbing websites. But the reality is that the front end is predicated entirely on a structurally sound back end. What good is a visually appealing website that nobody visits? What is its value to plumbers? The truth is that visuals only matter if you get the visitor to enter in the first place. That’s not possible without excellent website design.
So what makes web design suitable? For starters, a professional designer should create the framework. They should implement a clean and SEO-friendly code base, as well as SERP enhancers like schema markup. Does that all sound a little bit foreign to you? It should be because programming is not something that the general public understands. The need for professional web design is pressing, and it’s even more beneficial when the designer has a background in search engine optimization.
A solid codebase can place sites in an initial position to generate traffic. But the visual appeal, user experience, and navigability are what will keep them there. Google measures website performance in large part by how the user behaves after finding the site. If they exit immediately, the site’s bounce rate goes up. The higher the bounce rate, the worse your website is performing. One additional factor regarding design is how easy the website makes it for users to locate pertinent information. That means where to find you, how to contact you, how to review you, etc. These blocks of information should all be displayed prominently on a website. Plumbers should ensure their website excels in these areas:
Display
Navigation
User Experience
Visual Appeal
2) Code Base
Many points on the SEO checklist will tie directly back to design, which is why it is #1 on the list. The codebase is a prime example of an extension of design but requires its undivided attention. The back end of a website is made possible by coding. Whether it’s HTML, CSS, JavaScript, or any other kind of programming language, it matters for your website. What makes code so critical to website success is the language through which Google interprets the virtual object. What’s your company’s name, where is it located, what are the services, etc.
The front end of a website can promote these pieces of information through content, while the back end must use a microdata language known as schema.org. Most people reading this post use a template website for their plumbing services. Unfortunately, while it may have schema code, it isn’t likely to be optimal. Worse templates guarantee duplication of a codebase with other sites on the internet, sometimes even your competitors. But those listed above you for primary keywords more than likely have a custom code base rather than a premade template.
You can mark up almost every single component of your website with schema. Schema helps Google parcel your site’s data and understand its content to promote it best. The microdata tags can also encourage SERP enhancements which add exciting features to your search results, such as aggregate star ratings and site links. Much like ad extensions for PPC, SERP enhancements can make an organic impact outrank one that’s competing with it. A proper code base should exhibit these qualities:
Clean
Communicative
Custom
Structured (Schema Markup)
3) Content
There’s probably no word used more in the world of digital marketing than content. People swear by its value, and as Google’s algorithm has evolved, so has the standard for creating SEO-friendly content. Yet, to this day, many websites still exhibit shallow content. Content stuffed with keywords over and over again reads unnaturally and looks as if a 3rd grader wrote it with a poor grasp of sentence structure. The content that should be on your plumbing website is natural. Write your pages as you would want them described to your target customer. Consider identifying LSI keywords, natural synonyms, and terms related to your primary word, and place them within your content.
The presence of LSI keywords helps Google interpret a web page as robust and uses natural language that relates itself to the subject matter at large. The process of SEO writing has had difficulties shaking the tradition of keyword stuffing because old habits die hard. While using the keyword within the title tag and header tag is still encouraged, it should not be used more than once or twice within the body paragraphs themselves. A good rule of thumb is not to publish any content that doesn’t reflect how you would describe a service to customers in person. The written content is different from its spoken counterpart, but its entire presentation should mirror your direct intentions. Content on plumbing websites should favorably exhibit the following qualities:
Grammar
LSI Keywords
Readability
Sentence Structure
4) Google My Business & Maps
Google My Business is the easiest thing to get right for plumbers who are marketing their services online, and it happens to coincide directly with your company’s Google Maps listing. But there’s a caveat; it’s also one of the easiest things to screw up. Messed-up listings are usually a result of plumbers trying to do too much with their GMB account. It’s a fundamental concept. GMB tells Google the name, address, and category of your business so that they can adequately promote you to consumers in your local area on Google Maps. So that’s the very base level of Google My Business, but there are also additional steps that can make a GMB listing even more impactful.
One of those is the FAQ section, where the business owner answers frequently asked questions from consumers. Plumbers can also put in branded company photos, like pictures of your office, truck, etc. Don’t forget your company logo. Most plumbers understand that local SEO is essential, and Google Maps is the foundation of every local SEO strategy. Optimizing your Google My Business page encourages Maps placement. Here’s what you should attend to regarding your Google My Business:
Branded Profile
Company Pictures
NAP Accuracy
FAQ Section
5) Reviews
As we noted earlier, points on this checklist tend to relate to one another. Google My Business is one of the best sources of customer reviews, which brings us to the following checklist point for plumbers, which is online reviews. While Google should be a top source for reviews, it should not be the only source. For example, if you get ten reviews, about 5 of them should be on Google. The others can disperse to Facebook, Yelp, BBB, and several other worthy platforms. Google has even publicly discouraged the notion that all reviews should affiliate with Google My Business.
But to diversify reviews, you have to generate them and do it ethically. It would help if you actively pursued reviews by asking satisfied customers in person and integrating a reviews dashboard that automatically texts clients your review profiles on Google and Facebook. In addition, it would make it convenient for anyone on your website to click the review us button. Be careful about who you do ask for feedback, however.
If you had significant problems with one of your clients, and you know that they were challenging to work with, don’t promote your Google or Facebook account to them. Hopefully, clients like these are few and far between but don’t go looking for bad reviews. Although they will be inevitable at times, you can drown plenty of good ones, as well as your direct response to the bad ones with professional reactions. Make sure you monitor these aspects of your reviews:
Diversity (Google, Facebook, Yelp, etc.)
Quality
Quantity
Website Integration
6) Link Building
A website builds authority by the number of inbound links that point to it. MOZ measures their collective influence with a metric called domain authority. While DA is not a Google metric, it provides a general snapshot of the strength of inbound links pointing to a particular website. Domain authority (DA) measures on a 1-100 scale, with 100 being the most authoritative link profile imaginable and 1 being a link profile that ceases to exist. The whole concept of link building is dangerous for SEO. Not all links hold equal value, and many times, links can distract plumbers and other website owners from more manageable SEO tasks.
In 2012, Google’s Penguin update ended manipulative link building and heavily penalized sites that broke guidelines. Fast forward to 2019, and while penalties are no longer as typical, the value of low-quality links is pretty much zero, if not hostile. So how do you build links? The only avenues are creating great content, building citations, sharing on social media, and conducting PR and blogger outreach. The most valuable links come organically. If you write a great blog post about plumbing, share it on social media, and another blog links to the article, you’ve earned a precious organic link. This process is hard to execute; make no mistake. But consistency and attention to detail help make it more probable. Keep an eye on these link-building metrics.
Domain Authority: MOZ’s estimate of a website’s authority
Followed Linking Root Domains: The number of unique domains pointing to a site (with dofollow links)
Inbound Links: The number of total inbound links pointing to a website
Linking Root Domains: The number of total domains pointing to a site (both dofollow & nofollow links)
7) Social Media
Social media and SEO are related, whether you want to believe it or not. Many plumbers don’t want to hear that because they hate social media. And we don’t blame them. After all, how does an anti-social plumber utilize social media in 2019? Truthfully, you don’t have to be a digital celebrity to make an impact on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Linkedin, or YouTube. All you need is a legitimate presence on each platform. Unfortunately, Google has not been forthcoming about the direct influence of social media activity on search rankings. Still, evidence suggests that social signals take into account in one way or another.
That’s why publishing blogs on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn produce visual content for Instagram and YouTube. When people are engaging with your business, whether it likes, shares, views, comments, or otherwise, it signals to Google that your company is relevant and noteworthy. Again, you don’t have to be a typical social media personality to send out these signals. After all, you’re looking for engagement from plumbing customers. People who are your clients, or who will one day become them. One thing to consider with Facebook and Instagram is that you won’t get many organic impressions. If you want to be seen organically on these platforms, you’re going to have to pay to advertise on them. But branded searches still matter. So when consumers who have pre-existing knowledge of your company look for you on IG or Facebook and don’t find you, that’s a missed signal opportunity that could go to Google. Keep these things in mind when auditing your social media presence:
Branding
Signals
Syndication
Visibility
8) Ongoing Work
Is your plumbing website stagnant? Also, do you add new blog posts each month? Finally, Have you invested in a website redesign? In any case, you are jeopardizing your position on Google SERPs or preventing yourself from improving. SEO is not a one-time deal. To truly master SEO, plumbers must commit to consistent optimization tasks. Google constantly changes its algorithms as they evolve, and activity will also be necessary. That’s no different than any other form of marketing, whether it’s online or not. If you don’t make incremental improvements each month, year, and decade, you can’t expect to thrive in your marketplace.
An example of Google’s evolution relates to content advancements. Google used to reward content written a certain way and ranked pages with keyword stuffing. Today, those same techniques will hurt your rankings. So if you never updated your content, you lost major spots on Google’s SERPs. Ongoing work is imperative to sustain a certain level of ranking and improve upon it. And it goes beyond content. Other areas that require continuous attention are coding, design, and user experience. Plumbers will want to take special notice of the following areas when checking for ongoing work:
Coding: Is HTML, CSS, JavaScript, & Schema up to date and reflective of best practices?
Content: Is content up to date, and is it written for a 2019 reader?
Design: Is design fresh, engaging, and amenable to a 2019 visitor?
User Experience: Is a 2019 user going to have a positive experience with your site?
9) Paid Advertising
Plumbers tend to favor paid advertising, especially PPC from Google Ads, because it works quickly. PPC can be a significant part of an internet marketing strategy, as long as it coincides with macro-scale efforts like SEO, web design, etc. The problem with PPC is that it’s inherently short-lived. You can’t expect to make a living off of PPC ads. There are pockets of time when you can create significant ROI, but it cannot be your only source of traffic or lead generation if you expect to sustain success.
Furthermore, PPC only works with properly managed campaigns. Budgeting, targeting, and landing page optimization are crucial elements to Google Ads, and ignorance of them will result in a failed venture. Google is not the only paid advertising platform available to plumbers. Contractors can also invest in paid social media advertising like boosted Facebook posts or even Instagram posts. As we noted earlier, Facebook doesn’t show posts organically, so paying for promoted posts is one of the best ways to activate the social signals that influence SEO. Again, paid ads can be beneficial but only maximize when they are part of a more effective digital marketing strategy and one founded in SEO and website design. Ensure your paid advertising campaigns have these things managed:
Analysis
Budget
ROI
Targeting
10) Brand Authority
New forms of media have inserted themselves into the SEO discussion. Whether it’s video content, which has been around for some time but has recently started to become easier than ever to produce, or podcasts, which are an undervalued media format for any business, their collective influence over brand authority can be significant. The more signals a brand can send Google that is relevant and noteworthy, the more authority it can establish online. Podcasts and videos are great because they can be distributed and syndicated on multiple platforms. With podcasts, those can be Apple, Spotify, Stitcher, and embedment on your website. With video, it can be YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, and also embedment on your website.
Multimedia provides seemingly limitless options for plumbers, but convincing them to participate in producing this content can be challenging. If you are a plumber looking to take your business to the next level in 2019, you should more than consider a multimedia campaign; you should invest the resources required to do it. Brand authority is measured in more traditional ways as well. In other words, website design, logo design, and content marketing are also indicators of brand authority. But for this checklist, focus on these newer concepts:
Audio Podcasts
Branded Media
Multimedia Distribution
Video Content
11) Google Homepage
The Google homepage is an industry term for a phenomenon that exists with branded searches. When a consumer with pre-existing knowledge of your plumbing company types its name into Google, the entire SERP shows up for branded features, including the Knowledge Graph. The Knowledge Graph appears on the top of SERPs and shows your GMB profile and NAP information. It should also include a page full of organic results associated with your company, which might consist of everything from your website, social media profiles, and other business directories across the web. The bottom line is this; you want your branded SERP to look great. It will only look great if you’ve attended to each primary point of this checklist. So what are the components of an optimal Google homepage?
Branded: The Knowledge Graph should show your GMB profile, and all results should be associated with your company
Feature-Rich: Several SERP features should be present, including aggregate star ratings
Healthy: There should be plenty of results, and all first page ones should be relevant
Robust: There should be diversity in the pages that show up, like website, social, & profile
