(800) 541-5520
When customers search for a pest control company in your city. What they’ll typically type is your city and whatever they are looking for. For example, San Diego pest control, San Diego exterminator or they’ll search for a specific issue their having such as San Diego termites, or San Diego bed bugs. Just in case you’re not familiar with the differences between the paid listings, the organic listings, and the map listings, let me show you quickly how it works.
The areas along the top and bottom of the page are what we call paid listings or pay-per-click and that’s controlled through Google Ads where you’re able to basically pay to show up in those areas. This can work, but it tends to be pretty expensive to get a lead this way. A lot of businesses end of losing money if they don’t know how to do it just right. The other sections are what we call the nonpaid listings or organic listings.
The next section is where you rank within the Google map 3-pack. We’re going to cover that in the next video in this series.
The third section is where you rank on the organic listings and that is really important. In this video, we’re going to focus on the area labeled #3, the organic listings.
The fact is, it’s great to rank high when someone types in your city pest control or your city exterminator, but you probably provide a variety of pest control services. You may offer services to get rid of rodents, mosquitos, termites, bud bugs. You want to make sure that you rank for the most important keywords that people are searching for in your area. The reason I’m telling you this is to give you a better idea of what somebody might type in when they need your services. You need to ask yourself, okay, am I showing up at the top of the search engines right now and am I showing up for the most important services that people are searching for? So that’s the first thing. Are you showing up in one of the top spots for the most important keywords for your business? Yes or no? For the vast majority of pest control businesses, the answer is definitely no. So, how do we get your pest control website to rank in one of those top spots? The answer is pest control Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
First, you need to make sure that your website has pest control Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Let me give you a little crash course on what’s called on-page optimization and what a properly optimized pest control website looks like. When we look at a typical pest control website design, it’s somewhere between four to five pages. There will be a home page, about us page, services page, contact us page, and maybe a coupon page or a frequently asked questions page.
That’s a very basic website and that’s typical in the pest control industry. To get the best results from your pest control Search Engine Optimization (SEO), you have to have a lot more pages and content on your website because every page on your website can only be optimized for one to two keyword combinations. So if we’re talking about optimizing a pest control website for 10 different services, you should have a page for each one of those services.
You also need pages for each of the most important cities that you serve. And then you have to optimize all those pages. And so what are some things you can do to optimize the pages on your website? I could easily do a one-hour presentation on that one topic. But right now I want to give you the basics. So there are three major things you can do within your website to tell Google, okay, this page should be ranked for my city pest control or my city termites for example. The three things you need to get right are the title tag, the H1 tag and the content on the site. And so the area at the top section of the browser bar, that’s where your title tag is located.
In a lot of cases, I see pest control companies just have their company name on their title tag. When we’re trying to connect with people that are in the market for our services, they’re going to type in what they need. They’re typically going to type in their city and the service they want. For example, Grover Beach termites. And so you want to make sure you have your main keyword in that title tag.
You also want to make sure you have a keyword in the H1 tag, which is the headline for the first big block of text.
Then you want to make sure that you have good content that talks about that particular topic on your page. Good content means that the copy is written in a way that is user-friendly. You want your keyword to be included in the content 2-3 times in a large area of text but it needs to be included in a natural way. You don’t want to repeat the keyword a bunch of times because Google finds that practice spammy. The content also needs to be unique. That means you cannot copy the content from other pest control companies on the internet. Google finds duplicate content or copied content to be spammy and that will definitely hurt your rankings as well.
So, that’s the basic concept. If you optimize the title tags, H1 tags, and the content on your website for keywords that you’re trying to target for each page, that will significantly help your site to rank for those keywords. The typical pest control website has one services page with all the services listed on that page. But just having those things listed is not enough to potentially get ranked in the search engines for those particular keywords. So what I would encourage you to do, and what we do for our clients is to build pages for every single one of the pest control services that you offer. So you would have a dropdown similar to what you see on this website with links to all of your services pages.
For example, there’s a whole page just for termite inspections, there’s also a whole page just for fumigation, a whole page for Subterranean Termite treatments. On your website, you should have a different page for each major service that you offer.
The other thing you’re going to want to do is to make sure you have pages for each one of the major cities that you operate in. Now again, we find that a typical pest control company serves an area within a 20 to 40-mile radius. Within that 20-40 mile service area, you may be serving five to 10 sub-cities or towns. While your main city is what you want to focus on for your homepage.
If you want to rank for some of those sub-cities, you need pages on your pest control website specifically targeting each one of those cities. So you want to make sure you have pages for at least each one of your top five services and pages for at least the top 3-5 cities that you operate in. One of the areas we see people miss on this particular strategy is they’ll say, okay, I get it. I’ve got to have pages for each of my cities. And then they’ll create five different city pages. But the content for city one is almost the same as city two and city three, the only change is the city, and so they changed the city in the title tag and the H1 tag. Everything else is completely identical. This is crucial to successful pest control Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
That pest control marketing strategy worked a couple years ago. However, these days Google says no, that’s spam. And what’s happening is it will actually hurt your pest control website as opposed to helping it. And so if you’re going to do this, you’ve got to spend some time and some energy and create really good unique content for each one of those city pages. So that really covers the basics of on-page optimization. Now we move to off-page optimization.
Off-page Search Engine Optimization used to be all about getting a bunch of links to your website. Well, Google said, wait a minute, we’re letting companies game our system. So Google changed the rules. Just having a bunch of low-quality links doesn’t work anymore. Now what’s most important, is the quality and the relevancy of those links rather than the quantity. So as we talk about link building, we are really talking about building your domain (website) authority.
Don’t just say, okay, I’m going to go find a company that can get me a hundred links. You need to be smart and strategic. You need to get quality links, links that are relevant to your local community and related to pest control so that you can rank better and you don’t wind up getting penalized. If you have low-quality links right now, which you probably do, you need to spend some time cleaning up your link profile and that’s something that we can help you with or that’s something that you definitely need to address as part of your online marketing and Search Engine Optimization strategy.
So, you may be wondering, what are good links? Well, you can get links from online directories like Citysearch, Angie’s list, best of the web. There are more than a hundred online directories where you can get links for your pest control business.
Another great source for high-quality, relevant links is pest control associations like the National Pest Management Association and your state’s Pest Control Association.
Then there are the local associations you’re involved with, whether it’s BNI, your local association of realtors or the local chamber of commerce. These are the types of links that you want to start to get as a company. The other thing you can do from a link building perspective is what’s called competitive link acquisition and that’s the process of looking at the top pest control companies in your market. So let’s just say we type in your city pest control and we see who’s the number one company listed in the organic search results. Now they’re in that number one position because they’ve got more authority than the other companies. You can bet they’ve got more quality links. …so Google sees them as the most authoritative company for that particular search.
There are tools that you can use like Majestic or SEOBook where you can type in their website and it will generate a report for you and it will show you all of the links that they have pointing to their website. That’s going to be one of the main reasons Google has them ranked so well, and so what we can do is look at those top guys in your market, look at their links, and then get those same or similar links pointed back to your website. Now that’s a little bit advanced. It’s more of a Ninja strategy, but I’m telling you, if you do the things I’m talking about and you start to do some of that link building, you will start to rise up in the rankings to eventually become one of the dominant players on the search engines in your market. When that happens, you will be shocked at how much your phone starts to ring and how many leads you generate from the internet. Relevant links are vital to getting first-page ranking and account for a large part of pest control Search Engine Optimization (SEO) results.
The next step is to get citations. Citations are really just a listing of your company’s name, address, and phone number, and the most common place to get these citations is online directories and there are literally hundreds of them. The company we use and recommend to get citations is BrightLocal. I’ve shared a list of some of the most authoritative directories for the pest control industry. Google looks at these and says, okay, if you’re here and here, you must be an authority in your industry. The more of the top directories you’re in, the more Google can say, okay, you are in 100 online of the best directories versus one of your competitors that is in 20 directories. It’s really important that you are listed with the same name, address and phone number in all of those places. So a lot of the companies I’ve talked with have been through this. They’re not ranking well and they don’t understand why. They might be listed with one phone number on one directory and a different number or a different address on a different directory. And so it’s really important that you figure out what your name, address, and phone number are going to be online. It’s the inconsistency of that information that will hurt your pest control Search Engine Optimization and rankings in the organic listings.
Another important element to pest control Search Engine Optimization is having 5-star online reviews. So what you want to do is put a strategy in place where you can get reviews from your real customers and your true service. Google reviews are really important. But it’s also good to get reviews on websites like Yelp, Facebook, Citysearch.
It helps to have an automated system that makes the whole process of getting 5-star reviews a lot easier. We use and recommend the Five Star Review System and Nearby Now. After you ask the customer for permission, these systems make it really easy to send them a link that takes them to the review website of your choice. 5-star reviews are also critical for conversion. When people see those great 5-star reviews it makes them much more likely to choose you versus the competition.
Now the last thing on the list is putting out good relevant content. It’s not just about putting up your pages and driving links to them. You also want to put out good content positioning yourself as the authority in your market. So what I would encourage you to do is to update your blog at least once a month and to write articles that you can post to the local chamber of commerce or post to the local media to get that link and authority juice pointed back to your website.
And so the question is, are these things part of your pest control marketing strategy? Are you creating new content, updating the blog and creating inbound links and citations back to your website? Do you have your website optimized with all the pages you need? Do you have the time or do you have somebody on your team with the time and knowledge that can do all of this for you? Do you want to spend your time chained to a computer trying to market your business?
You can try to do it yourself, or you can hire a company you trust to do it for you. That way you can get results a lot faster and start getting more calls, more sales, and more revenue for your business. Search Engines love relevant content that is fresh and unique. Having great content is a vital part of your pest control Search Engine Optimization.
