Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is important for tree service contractors for lead generation. An effective SEO campaign will include content marketing to showcase the tree service company's expertise to prospective tree care customers.
It can be intimidating to take your business online — especially if you're in an industry that traditionally has relied on newspaper advertising and word-of-mouth referrals. Tree service businesses absolutely fit this description. In the past, success in the green industry meant building up a reputation and counting on past customers to recommend you to friends and coworkers, but today, with nearly limitless information available at a person's fingertips, you can count on the fact that your prospective customers are going to do a little research before making a decision whether to trust your business or not.
Suddenly, you have to navigate the unfamiliar (and competitive) waters of the digital space. How can you survive? How can you continue to generate leads? How can you separate yourself from the pack?
The Answer? SEO
Search engine optimization (SEO), describes actions taken to improve a website's rank in organic — unpaid — search results. If you're new to the term, it may be difficult to wrap your head around. An effective SEO strategy is made up of hundreds of different factors, each crucial in allowing your business to appear at the top of the list when a prospective customer types in a search for a certain word or phrase into Google or Bing.
While many people don't fully understand SEO and how it can help their business, it's not something you can sacrifice and expect to flourish in the digital space. Here's why tree service SEO is vitally important to the online success of your business, and how you can succeed with the help of a few savvy digital marketing maneuvers.
The Importance of Google My Business in Tree Service Marketing
Every SEO strategy starts with Google My Business, or GMB. This is basically a social profile for your business that allows it to show up on a map. It displays your office location, your hours of operation, your contact information, your reviews, photos, and more to customers searching for providers in your industry.
It also allows people searching for your services to access your website or make a call to your office with the click of a button, which makes it as easy as possible for your business to showcase what you have to offer.
And, as long as you're still providing excellent service, you'll benefit from positive engagement. Research shows that positive customer reviews are among the top factors that cause one GMB profile to rank higher than another. Speaking of which…
An Optimized GMB Profile Ranks in the Local Pack
Ask any digital marketer where the leads come from for their business, and more often than not, they won't hesitate before answering: Google search.
57% of marketers say that SEO is their top lead generation tool, and the best part? It's free. That means a successful SEO strategy essentially provides limitless ROI for your business.
Imagine that you're a homeowner, and you notice a tree limb growing dangerously close to your home. You sit down at your computer and search “Tree Service near me” to find a company to come out and remove it.
At or near the top of the search engine results page (SERP), there will be a box with a small map and three horizontal listings below it. This feature is called Google's “local pack”, the “snack pack”, or the “3-pack”.
The local pack comes into play in 93% of searches with so-called “local intent”. This usually means the language of the search includes the name of a product or service and the name of either a geographic area or the words “near me”.
If customers are likely to consider the most convenient solutions first, getting in the local pack for a given search can be the difference between rapid tree service lead generation and new leads that trickle in at a glacial pace.
Boost SEO with Content
So now, you have a well-optimized, informative GMB profile. You're ranking for your local searches. You have location pages for your physical location plus every one of your service areas. Now what?
The next phase involves using valuable, relevant content to keep your SEO as strong as possible. Google decides its rankings for a given search using an algorithm, or an automated series of instructions. While this algorithm changes frequently and is mysterious even to people who have worked on it, what we know is this: if you create strong content, relevant to both your audience and the keywords you're targeting, you'll be able to strengthen SEO by adding more and more content about the topics your audience is actively searching for.
In the early days, Google's search algorithm was relatively simple — as long as you used certain target keywords, you could rank. Today (more specifically, as of an update in August 2018), the algorithm is much more sophisticated. Google rewards content that shows Activity, Relevancy, Trust & Authority (ART) because it wants to ensure that users are finding the top results on a given SERP useful.
So, the stronger a piece of content is, the more impact it will have on SEO and the more people will read it, meaning more traffic, time on page, backlinks, and other — direct and indirect — ranking factors.
Still Not Sure Where to Start?
That's okay. Tree service lead generation isn't easy, especially when you're building your digital presence from the ground up. Luckily, we can help. Click here to schedule a free consultation with Bradley Benner, SEO expert, and owner of Big Bamboo Marketing.
You can also register to purchase tree service leads in your area here: https://bigbamboomarketing.com/tree-service-leads