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 also affects 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.
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