Want a sign of the importance of search engine results for local businesses? All the way back in 2011, the Yellow Pages Association, who for decades put out books for people to leaf through to find your business, rebranded as the Local Search Association .
Rather than go extinct, they changed with the times and if you run a small business, you had better do the same.
Of course, you might not know anything about the Hummingbird algorithm, link analysis, or voice search. You’re busy running an HVAC company. Luckily, quality SEO services can take on the grunt work, leaving you time to handle all those new customers.
Better Google Results, Better Profits
The phone book is dead. Word of mouth will help you build a business, but if you really want effective HVAC marketing people need to be able to find you on Google, especially if you’re a local business.
The numbers speak for themselves.
The number of people who click on Google results varies wildly based on position
. The first organic result garners 28.5% of clicks. That drops to 15.7% for the second, 11% for the third, and all the way to 2.5% for the third. Let’s not even talk about the second page.
Local or “near me” searches have been one of the fastest-growing categories for Google searches and those searches have evolved to be more specific over time. In total, more and more people are searching for things like “HVAC services near me”, trusting Google to return reliable results.
SEO Services Can Take Care of the Coding
There’s a lot you can do to improve your SEO ranking without knowing very much about computers. For instance, you can create great content and promote it through your own social media to get people to share it.
But, to make it close to the top of the results, you’ll need to maximize your website so it’s available to search engine crawlers Search engines use automated programs to scour websites, and if these programs cannot read your site, then Google cannot index it.
Building a search engine-friendly site can take some serious technical know-how. You’ll need to do things like:
- Create a flat site architecture
- Build a sitemap and submit it to Google
- Add alt tags to all your images
- Replace any subdomains with subfolders
- Edit your metadata.
In other words, you’ll need to get your hands dirty in HTML for your site to rank really well. It’s asking a lot to expect someone to be an expert HVAC technician and a crack coder.
Hiring professional SEO services can take the latter task off your plate. Adam Smith explained the advantages of dividing labor: when everyone does a specialized task, we can finish jobs more quickly and with better results.
Reap the Rewards of Expertise
You can’t expect to become an expert coder overnight. In fact, taking the time to learn SEO practice would probably hurt your company, taking time away from actually helping your customers. Instead, turn to professional SEO services and attract more customers without the headaches.
For more tips on business, finance, or technology, browse some of our other blog posts.