Apart from employees and equipment, your brand is the most important company asset. Effective branding separates fledgling companies from industry champions. Despite this, thousands of plumbing contractors continue to neglect branded SEO online. Below, Jason and Nolen discuss how to unlock your brand’s potential in organic search. They’ll also point out some disastrous mistakes that hurt local businesses.
If you desire stronger online lead generation, be sure to listen closely!
Pro Tips for Plumbing Contractors
- Never abandon an established brand name or URL, unless you absolutely have to.
- Treat your digital brand with the same respect as you would your physical brand.
- Don’t try to “game the system” using your GMB account. It could cost you!
- Negative reviews lose their impact when surrounded by a host of positive feedback.
- Make sure your website is optimized for local search.
What is Branded SEO?
Branded SEO refers to optimizing your online assets in a way that makes your brand more recognizable and trusted by Google. Just like developing trust with someone takes time and effort, so does establishing your trustworthiness with the world’s most popular search engine. As you prove your company’s reliability, local search rankings almost always rise as a result.
Why Trust Matters
Google Search strives to provide finely tuned results for all of its user base. If you want to buy tickets to a football game or purchase a gift for a family member, the search engine wants to make sure the results you see not only match the keywords you typed but that they bring you much closer to your desired service/product. If they believe a website won’t provide dependable results, that site will never see page one rankings!
In other words, Google needs to know that you’ll provide the quality services you claim to. Any plumbing company can say they provide “professional water heater repair in San Antonio, TX”, but only a handful get listed. How do these businesses achieve such fantastic success? Let’s break down that process.
Premium Listings Like These Only Happen When Google Highly Trusts a Business.
Strategy for Successful Branded SEO
Complete Your GMB Listing
Everything starts with your online company listing! Google My Business (GMB) provides a free, convenient way to get your plumbing business listed. Without claiming and completely filling out this profile, it’s almost impossible to achieve top rankings in local search. Then again, businesses that take full advantage of GMB tend to enjoy higher rank and website traffic! If you haven’t already, make sure your business listing has been claimed and finished.
Again, it’s free and from Google. That alone makes GMB worth the minimal time investment! Just make sure that the address you register with Google is the same one you use for all your other citation sources (such as Yelp and BBB), and vice versa. Even differences in abbreviation can make Google suspicious.
Optimize Your Website
We could spend hours talking about what makes a website appear more trustworthy to Google. The company website is an integral part of branded SEO. Google Search regularly combs through your site, searching for new pages and content. If its crawlers (bots used to examine a site) discover these elements, it’s much more likely to judge your company favorably.
- Service Pages
- A Company Blog
- Clearly Visible Branding (Logo, Contact Info, Etc.)
- A Sitemap
- Applicable Keyword Usage
- Professional Content Formatting
- Optimized Imagery
- Schema Coding
Gather and Integrate Your Reviews
Reviews, reviews, reviews! Nothing breaks down walls faster than a glowing recommendation from a customer. If you don’t already, make sure you’re asking all your clients (especially the happy ones) to complete a reviews. Sooner is better; people tend to forget their enthusiasm months after service.
For plumbing contractors that really want to supercharge their branded SEO, be sure to integrate reviews into your website. There are a handful of capable tools, but we recommend Righteous Reviews. It compiles reviews from your favorite sources into your website, and even produces geotagged data – Google highly values this data – through check-ins and automated feedback requests.
Branding Tactics to Stay Away From
While successful branded SEO takes time to cultivate, it only takes one wrong step to doom your brand online. While Google is willing to forgive many mistakes, there are some foolish tactics that will inevitably lead to a permanent de-listing on the search engine! What sort of strategies should you stay away from?
- Attempting to sabotage other company listings.
- Creating fake reviews.
- Paying for reviews.
- Making false claims about your services or industry.
- Using racist or overly-disparaging language when speaking with customers online.
- Creating fake locations to appear larger.
- Using tactics explicitly banned by Google.
Of course, not every poor strategy is banned. For instance, anyone can change their brand name, even though it will almost certainly set back their branded SEO for years! Unless legal action compels you to, never change your brand name.
Want to Learn More?
Our team at Plumbing Webmasters would love to talk with you and answer all your questions about branded SEO! We support hundreds of businesses around the country, producing stronger rankings, site traffic, and leads. To learn more about our services, check out the links below or call us at (877) 388-9884.
Additional Resources from Plumbing Webmasters
Other Podcasts and Articles
– Forced to Brand (Podcast)
– PPC vs Organic 2020: True Client Stories (Podcast)
Plumbing SEO Services
– Plumber Reputation Management
– Organic SEO for Plumbing Contractors
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