Local services have a huge advantage on Google search and other search engines for one major reason. They are local. Even if there are 50 other service companies in your area, you have a huge opportunity to rank keywords to your local customers, and it is not as hard as you might think.

If you are unfamiliar with the term Google Search, I mean the list of results that show up after you search in Google. You can apply the same principals in this article to all the other search engines as well, like Bing, Duck Duck Go, and others.

The goal for every local business should be to make sure to show up in the first results that Google shows.

For a business like ours, it can be very difficult to rank any keywords, because we are competing with thousands of other Web design and website management companies on the web that have been writing much longer, have more “back-links” and have been ranking for years now.

For a local service business, you have a wonderful opportunity to rank your website in the top 10 results on Google, because you aren’t competing with nearly as many businesses in your area.

Now, don’t get me wrong. If you want to rank for the keyword “Septic service company,” you will probably never do it, at least not without spending a whole lot of money, and providing services to all 50 US states. BUT, you will find it is MUCH easier to rank a keyword like “Septic Service company in city, state”.

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The reason why is that your business is one of maybe 50 septic service companies in your area, and I would probably venture to say that only 5 of them have any sort of a website or have tried to improve their own search rankings.

Google and other search engines use robots to crawl websites. They go from link to link to link all day, every day viewing websites and recording what is written in the site. That is how they know what to show a searcher when someone searches online for something. Google serves them the most relevant content on the web.

Google will only show people what is on the web.

Now, they serve the most relevant content on the WEB. They have no idea what is off of the web, so if you don’t have a website at all, they will never serve info about you to a searcher. Over years of business, other websites may have info on your business, but it will be limited in scope and you will probably not be accurately portrayed.

What if you do have a website? Well, that is where the contents of this article really come into play.

Structure your site with your city in mind.

Your website should be structured in a way to reach your target audience. For instance, if you are a septic service company in Pasco, Washington, you don’t want to be found by searchers in Seattle. They would simply visit your site, then go back and search again. You need the contents of your site to speak to people in Pasco.

One simple change you can make to your website that will help reach searchers in your local area is to rename your website title. Instead of naming it by only your business name like, “Septic Company Name”, you should name your site, “Septic Company Name | A Septic Service Company in Pasco Washington.” You can substitute the name and city with your business name and state. Of course, if you are a local contractor, you will want to also change the wording to correctly describe your company.

When you change your website title, use a descriptive term that applies to your company. Use a term that you would use if you searched for your own service online. For example, “local excavating contractor in pasco wa”.

Simply having a title that reaches your target audience will greatly increase your rankings in your local area, but don’t stop there.

Make sure your site is welcoming and your headings are structured properly.

You will want to make sure your website is welcoming and speaks to your customers when they first visit your site. Use high-quality images from your local business, not only of your work, but also of your employees, and maybe some of happy customers, (with their permission, of course). Give these images names and descriptions that properly describe the photos and include your target keywords.

Another thing you can do to improve your keyword ranking for your local business is to structure your headings properly. I wrote another blog about that which you can read, but the jist of it is to make sure only to have one H1, nest other headings within it, and use your keywords.

Use your local service area cities in your content on the page as well.

Write your content for people.

When you write, it may be tempting to put a bunch of paragraphs poorly written together with as many words as possible so that you get as many keywords as possible on your site. That would be a terrible mistake. Your goal should be to draw visitors to your site into contacting your business or applying for a quote through your website. Language that is easy to understand and broken with headings will help do this.

When people visit your website, you want them to have a proper view of your company from their first glance.

Does your website truly reflect who you are?

If you realize the answer to that question is “no”, contact us. I would be happy to design your local business a fresh website and include all of the SEO best practices I’ve wrote about above in your site. Contact us today to get a quote!