When customers in your area are looking to hire a plumbing, HVAC, or electrical contractor, you want them to be able to find you easily. To make it easy for customers to track you down, improving your local SEO search results on Google is a good place to start. Paying attention to local SEO ranking factors can give you an advantage with local customers.
Learn more about how to improve your local Google search results by paying attention to these factors.
Understanding the Importance of Local SEO Ranking Factors
When you rank highly for local search ranking factors related to your services, you’re more likely to make a connection with customers who are physically close enough to visit your business. Local visibility is key to making customer connections.
When someone is looking for nearby services related to your business, you want to generate search visibility for them. For small businesses, it’s not quite as important to rank highly in general Google searches. If someone who’s 500 miles away finds your local HVAC company, they’re probably not going to visit you.
But if someone who’s five miles away finds you through local SEO search results and local relevant searches, you have a far better chance of gaining a customer.
Why You Should Focus on Google Search
Certainly, search options beyond Google exist to generate the desired local results. Occasionally, a customer may find you using one of these other search options.
However, Statista estimates that Google dominates around 82% of the search engine optimization market. Over the past decade, Google’s share of the search engines market steadily measured well above 80%. In other words, Google’s dominance over the other search engines isn’t likely to change in the near future.
When you have limited resources to devote to your local SEO ranking factors, focusing on Google gives you the best return for your dollar because of the overwhelming number of potential local customers who use Google.
Using Google Business Profile To Improve Your Ranking in Local Search Results
Your Google Business Profile — formerly Google My Business — is a key tool related to local searches. This tool from Google provides basic information about your business that local searchers will be relying on, including:
- Phone number
- Website
- Hours of operation
- Address
- Description of your business
- Business category
Adding information about your local business through your business profile on Google is the best way to reach out to your local customers. You also should add some photos and a list of products and services you offer to your business profile, all of which helps with your local SEO results.
Generate your own photos that clearly show your location. If you pick stock photos, customers are less likely to trust you.
You can create links to your website’s blog in Google Business Profile. If you have special offers or anything else you want to highlight, you can do this here, too.
It’s important to maintain accurate information in your Google Business Profile. If you try to embellish the services you offer or jam local keywords inorganically into your business name, Google will flag the information. Potential customers likely will report you to Google or will simply lose trust in you.
Keep Your Information Current and Relevant
As a key ranking factor, pay attention to the accuracy of your Google Business Profile’s information. You need this information to be accurate and consistent across all your internet properties, whether that’s on X, Facebook, your website, or your business profile. Set a calendar reminder to check all your business information periodically.
If you have a change in business hours and fail to update your Google Business Profile factors, customers will become frustrated with the inaccurate local listings and how they appear in local rankings.
Understand the Importance of Google Maps
Google Maps is a key aspect of managing your relevant search results while using Google Business Profile. In fact, one of the easiest ways to edit this information for most local businesses is through Maps.
The Maps app has tens of millions of users, and they often use it to find the local businesses they want to visit when they’re away from home.
To improve local rankings under Google Maps, local business owners need accurate information under Google Business Profile. Maps pulls a lot of its information from here for your search location. For example, Maps uses your address under your business profile to deliver relevant results to users of the app when they’re searching for nearby businesses.
Ask for Customer Reviews
Online customer reviews can be key local SEO ranking factors. When you have reviews, people searching for your business are more likely to trust you.
After customers visit your business, focus on encouraging satisfied customers to leave online reviews. If you collect customers’ email address, you may want to set up automatic reminders about leaving Google reviews. Ask them to visit business directories, local business listings, and other third party review sites, too. Such reviews may show up in your local search rankings, providing a boost for your business.
Respond To Your Customer Reviews
Once a customer leaves a review of your local HVAC, plumbing, or electrician business, respond to it. Whether you have negative or positive reviews, responding to your customer reviews shows potential new customers that you’re paying attention to customers’ needs.
If you have negative reviews, offer to try to alleviate the customers’ concerns. Even if the customers don’t want your help with fixing their issues, your response shows potential new customers that you are willing to help. Through your response and offer to help, customers may be willing to update their opinions, turning them into positive reviews.
When requesting reviews, encourage your customers to share any photos they took while visiting your business. Photos make the review stand out from the crowd under local organic ranking factors.
Build Content With a Local Flavor
As you build content on your local business website, focus on local keyword topics and on stories with local relevance for a better ranking factor within local organic results.
Creating great content and establishing domain authority is the primary key to driving traffic to your website under local ranking factors. However, paying attention to local search ranking factors and local organic rankings helps, too.
Think about the topics your local customers will search for that relate to your business. Then create content that fits local organic search rankings. You can also sprinkle in your city name to drive more traffic.
Try to stick with more common search topics for your home page and other interior pages. Use less common search terms that have a local intent for blog posts or for highly specialized interior pages to help with local search engine rankings. In the home services industry, we typically find that producing relevant location service pages can significantly move the needle when trying to rank locally. Don’t forget to create great meta descriptions.
Develop Locally Based Backlinks
A backlink occurs when another website creates inbound links to some of the content on your website. Google local search ranking factors place an emphasis on backlinks and local link building. Google assumes that if another website is willing to link to your website, your content must be authoritative.
You can reach out to other businesses and organizations in your area to try to generate backlinks and inbound links to your website, which should improve your ranking factor in this area.
- Offer to write guest blog posts for other local companies’ websites that focus on your area of expertise and that link back to your website.
- Offer to volunteer with a local business organization or serve on a governing board and include backlinks in your profile.
- Work with or sponsor local organizations and events, giving your website a backlink.
- Create partnerships with other local businesses who have complementary offerings to yours — not competing — and create backlinks for each other.
- Ask local media news sites to profile something your business is doing with charities or similar actions, creating a link to your website in the story.
Make Your Website Mobile-Friendly
One of the most important ranking factors that some businesses don’t consider as heavily as they should is maintaining a mobile-friendly website.
This is especially important for improving your local SEO rankings. If someone in your local area is looking for your business while out running errands, they’re almost certainly using Google on a smartphone. Statista estimates as much as 59% of the website traffic occurring around the world occurs on a mobile device.
If you created your website several years ago, it may need an update to make it work seamlessly for local search results on a mobile device.
Additionally, Google’s local SEO ranking factors favor websites that work better on mobile devices.
Improve Your Local Search Ranking Factors With Rival Digital’s Help
Paying attention to your local search ranking factors can give you the results you want when it comes to drawing local customers to your brand. At Rival Digital, we specialize in helping HVAC, plumbing, and electrical contractors target local users poised to become customers.
Learn more about how we can help with local SEO ranking factors that affect your business by calling us today at (800) 674-9823 or by scheduling a complimentary Digital Strategy Session.
