SEO experts recommend following all the 15 local SEO tips provided in this guide to earn higher rankings that will drive more customers to your local AC repair company or appliance repair business.
Air conditioning repair companies and appliance repair companies that are not taking enough time to optimize for SEO end up missing out on huge potential revenue.
When you earn higher rankings both in Google search results and Google Maps, it helps to put your business in front of customers nearby that are already looking for AC repair or appliance repair services.
Making sure that you optimize your website and online directory listings is one of the most effective steps you can take as a local service business owner toward winning more customers.
But how does the process of optimizing your local air conditioner repair or appliance repair business to rank higher in search look like? And how does it differ from general SEO best practices?
That has already been found out, by asking more than 80 local SEO experts that provided their best tips on how to optimize local businesses for organic search.
- What is Local SEO?
- Why is Local SEO important?
- Local SEO Checklist: 15 Ways to Earn Higher Rankings
- 6 Local SEO Tools to Boost Your Ranking
What Is Local SEO?
Local SEO is mainly about the process that has to be followed to get a local business to start ranking higher and gaining more visibility in organic search results like the Google search results and Google Maps.
Keep in mind that a local business is one that has a specific geographical area that it serves. Your HVAC business or appliance repair business is a great example of a local service area business that only serves people within a specific neighborhood, city, county or state, unlike businesses that serve customers nationally or globally.
So between general SEO and local SEO, what is the difference?
While both general SEO and local SEO do overlap in many ways, local SEO mainly involves all the tactics aimed at ranking local businesses higher in local search results, like through the creation and optimization of Google My Business listing and online directory citations. However, both the general SEO and local SEO disciplines require optimizing websites and building backlinks.
Why Is Local SEO Important?
HubSpot provides a list of local SEO statistics that highlight the importance of local SEO. These include the following:
- About 46% of Google searches are related to local information.
- About 72% of customers after doing local search end up visiting or calling a local business within 5 miles.
- About 78% of mobile searches that are based on locations end up in offline purchases of products or services.
- About 92% of customers searching online will only choose businesses that appear on the first page of local search results.
So if your air conditioning or appliance repair business isn’t being optimized for local search, you are definitely going to be missing out on a great amount of awareness, website traffic or visitors that turn into leads and revenue that Google and other search engines could be sending to your business.
Local SEO remains critically important for boosting your AC repair or appliance repair business’s visibility in online search. That is what ensures your business gets in front of potential customers exactly at the time when they are searching for the services that your business has to offer.
Local SEO Checklist: 15 Ways to Earn Higher Rankings
According to recommendations by more than 80 SEO experts, there are 15 local SEO tips as listed below that you can use to earn higher rankings and that drive more customers to your local AC repair or appliance repair business:
- Find all the main keywords you want to rank for
- Get your homepage optimized for your main keywords
- Create content about your air conditioning or appliance repair services, cities or locations you service, etc
- Get your business website content optimized for long tail keywords as well as voice search
- Optimize your website SEO titles, Meta descriptions, and the URLs
- Create website pages that are unique for each of the locations in your service area
- Optimize for mobile your HVAC website or appliance repair site
- Use the local business structured data
- Build all the backlinks you can get from other local businesses
- Make sure that your business is listed in local directories
- Make sure that your business data across the directories is kept consistent
- Claim your Google My Business profile and make sure it is optimized
- Prioritize the collection of customer reviews
- Regularly publish Google posts
- Analyze your main competitors for local SEO strategies
PRO TIP: How to do Monitoring and Evaluation of your SEO Performance
If you would like to know more about the behavior of visitors while on your website, both Google Analytics and Google Search Console provide a way of tracking several on-page events and metrics:
- Organic sessions by web page. Helps you understand which of your website pages are receiving most of the organic traffic and end up generating signups.
- Organic goal completions by web page. Identify the web pages that are currently reaching your conversion goals and also the ones that require updates or further optimization.
- Organic clicks by queries. See the search queries that are currently generating more clicks for your website.
- Organic clicks by page. Get to know the page currently receiving most of the clicks coming from search results pages.
- Organic sessions. Get to know the number of organic succession that your website receives.
And a lot more…
A Google Analytics Web Page SEO Dashboard Template such as the plug-and-play Databox template put together with the help of highly experienced SEO and website conversion experts can be of great benefit because it shows you most of the important metrics needed for purposes of monitoring the performance of your web page. It provides a simple way of implementing a standalone dashboard or marketing reports that you can start using for free.
You can set up your dashboard easily in just a few clicks
It takes only 3 simple steps to complete your dashboard setup as outlined below:
Step #1: Get your template
Step #2: Connect with Databox both your Google Analytics as well as Google Search Console accounts.
Step #3: Watch as your new dashboard gets populated in just seconds.
1. Find All The Main Keywords For Ac Repair Or Appliance Repair That You Would Like To Rank For
Finding the right keywords to target for your air conditioning or appliance repair business is definitely one of the most important things to do for your local SEO campaign. You need to do that to be able to start optimizing your business website so that it has a chance to rank in local search results for those keywords.
So what is the best approach to consider using for your local seo keyword research? A poll conducted to find out the most popular methods used for local seo keyword research, revealed that monitoring competitors was the most popular approach according to the respondents, getting 38.6% of the votes.
If you simply take a look at the Google’s page-one results, you can quickly find out the keywords that your HVAC business or appliance repair business competitors are using in the titles of their articles and metadata. That way, you get to know what is working locally so that you can improve on it and make it work to your advantage.
Experts also recommend use of Google’s autocomplete feature as well as several keyword research tools. SEMrush and Moz are some of the most popular ones out there. They make it possible to discover long-tail keywords that are usually searched for by users in more specific locations.
Autocomplete keywords are normally displayed right under Google’s search bar when you start typing in a query.
Most of the searches usually include names of places in addition to what people are looking for. For example, “air conditioning repair miami” or “appliance repair miami” include names of cities where people are looking for the services. So it is a good idea to include names of cities and neighborhoods because that can be a great way of gaining traffic.
Another great idea that experts recommend is to do a TF-IDF (term frequency–inverse document frequency) analysis because it complements basic keyword research. What that simply means is that you have to identify other words that if included in your website content can improve how information is searched. They are not words you necessarily need to optimize for.
For example, with service providers in the home services industry taking COVID 19 measures to protect themselves and their customers, most air conditionng repair and appliance repair business websites may include content about such topics in some of their pages that rank. If data revelas that 10 of the highest rankng pages on Google cover the topic, you should also make an effort to make that topic part of your content as well so that Google algorithms can see your content as complete based on comparison with pages alreday ranking.
However, these other keywords based on TF-IDF data analysis are not meant to replace your AC repair or appliance repair keyword data. They just work side by side to ensure your content can be seen to be complete and to give it a higher chance of ranking on Google.
Learn More About Keyword Research From Our Recent Posts:
2. Get Your Homepage Optimized For Your Main Keywords
One way of improving your strategy for local SEO is to optimize your business website for local keywords.
The name of the city can be included a few times on your homepage. It should be included in the page title, one of the secondary headings at least, then a few times in the copy within the alt text of your images as well as in the meta description.
When you want to rank for a local AC repair or appliance repair business in any given city, you can also talk about people from the city. That makes it easier to include the name of the city on your homepage several times.
In addition to that, it is a great idea to get an SEO dashboard that helps you in monitoring the performance of all your main keywords over time.
One of the most important initial steps for improving local SEO that your air conditioning repair business or appliance repair business should take, is to ensure the homepage page title includes the main keyword for the service and the location (neighborhood, city, county, or state) where you are located or provide services to your customers.
If in that case your local seach terms have low competition, that will easily get your business showing up on the first page of most relevant search results on Google.
Learn More About Website Optimization From Our Recent Posts:
3. Create content about your air conditioning or appliance repair services, cities or locations you service, etc
Writing content about your business services offered in specific locations can be a great way of earning higher rankings and generating more traffic. It is not only recommended to write content about your AC repair or appliance repair services but also to write about you service area locations, the cities, towns, or neighborhoods.
While trying to implement their local SEO strategy some businesses are likely to neglect writing local content. But creating some pages centered around your locations and services that your business provides can actually prove to be useful in helping to increase your rankings for both local and the standard search results. That makes it possible for your business to occupy the real estate available in Google search results for both your business services and the locations you target.
When you publish some niche guides related to local businesses, local attractions, points of interest and events, that can be a great way of boosting your brand exposure, increasing local relevancy and also making more local link building opportunities available for your air conditioning or appliance repair business.
For example, one business decided to write an article about all the dog rescues, dog parks and shelters within the local city and county where they usually offer their services. That article went on to become a very useful resource and the page was able to bring more than 3,000 monthly unique visitors.
In addition to creating such resource guides, it is also important for your business to create content that promotes local news, industry gatherings, employees as well as educational content on your business website blog.
Today marketing experts are also recommending creating videos and treating them as the new content king. YouTube videos remain the most important considering that YouTube has now become the second largest search engine that is only growing. Videos are increasingly occupying a lot of space in search results pages (SERPs).
In relation to your air conditioning repair or appliance repair services, you can focus on making short videos and demos, creating some educational videos based on how-to topics especially for DIY repairs that most homeowners might be interested in, running live broadcasts, webinars and interviews.
4. Get Your Business Website Content Optimized For Long Tail Keywords As Well As Voice Search
It is a great idea basing your website content optimization on popular key question phrases. Here are some examples:
“What is the best …?”
What is the best AC repair in New York City?
What is the best appliance repair in New York City?
“Where is the best …?”
Where is the best appliance service in New York City?
Where is the best HVAC contractor in New York City?
“How to find the best …?”
How to find the best air conditioning repair company in New York City?
How to find the best appliance repair company in New York City?
All the above are great examples that can increase the chances of your website not only ranking for long-tail keywords but also for voice search queries.
Experts say that people that use voice search when looking for services like air conditioner repairs or appliance repair services are more likely to make decisions faster than people who use text for searching.
When people make use of voice search, the Google Assistant also reads aloud the content found in featured snippets. You have to consider optimizing your content for voice search in order to get the best results.
5. Optimize Your Website SEO Titles, Meta descriptions, And The URLs
Google seach results typically show the SEO title, URL and meta description of webpages:
That is the reason why you must come up with very clear titles for your pages, the meta descriptions and URLs for each. Local searchers in most cases tend to look for [service] + [location] (e.g. ‘AC repair new york city’ or ‘appliance repair new york city’), so it is important to make it very clear for anyone that scrolls through the search results that that’s what your local business does.
The location you’re trying to rank for whether it’s a city state or suburb should be included.
Experts will also recommend that you optimize your business website’s URLs and structure as well. “For example, website.com/location/service sends a signal to your page visitors that:
(a) your business offers the service they are seeking for, and
(b) they can get your service from their convenient geographical area.”
6. Create Website Pages That Are Unique For Each Of The Locations In Your Service Area
Chances are that your air conditioning or appliance repair business being a service area type oof business operates in a number of locations. For that type of business, many experts recommend that you should create for each of your locations a separate page.
Here are some of the suggestions provided on how to go about making unique separate location pages:
- Make sure to include practice or provide business-specific anecdotes as well as statistics on your location pages.
- Local contact details should be included and so are the local associations, and any other content that is locally relevant
- Each page should provide the details of the services that you provide including all the benefits and differentiators, and most importantly displaying local relevancy. Images , videos, reviews and testimonials can be used to show local relevancy so that you are not just relying on using blocks of text.
- Each locations page needs to have an embedded Google Map.
Location pages are critical when it comes to organic listings ranking just beneath the local pack (Google Maps part of the local search results). Just make sure tto focus on creating the pages to include information that is locally relevant and useful.
7. Optimize For Mobile Your HVAC Website Or Appliance Repair Site
Optimizing your AC repair business website or appliance repair business website for mobile can be one of the most effective ways of improving your local SEO strategy.
That is something you must do considering 52.2% of all the website traffic around the world is currently being generated through the mobile phone devices, a number that is expected to continue increasing every year.
Optimizing your website for mobile phones will significantly boost the chances of your business getting more exposure online and most importantly getting leads.
8. Use The Local Business Structured Data
Use of Local Business structured data on your website contact or location pages is highly recommended as it gives context to the search engines as far as your business location and how to get in touch with you are concerned.
This tool serves as a Local Business Schema Generator that helps when adding structured data to any of your local AC repair or appliance repair business’s website pages
Structured data has proved to be useful in helping local businesses both in air conditioning and appliance repair industries to stand out in local search. Before visiting any websites, searchers need to extract more information and that is normally contained in rich snippets. It is critically important to have this for your AC repair or appliance repair website because it improves your click-through rates.
Gaining any extra real estate on the screen displaying Google search results which are increasingly becoming saturated is an opportunity not to be taken for granted at all.
With search engines trying to make sure that they can provide the best help possible for users to decide without much hesitation on which businesses to visit, structured data plays an incredibly important role in making sure that the search engine results provide a complete picture that supports searchers in making the best and fast decisions about the businesses they can trust.
9. Build All The Backlinks You Can Get From Other Local Businesses
Getting links from other local businesses does help to boost your rankings for local keywords and it is especially more important where the competition is high.
Many experts have given various suggestions on how to earn backlinks for air conditioning and appliance repair business websites from other local businesses. The suggestions include the following:
- Write guest posts on local blogs that are relevant to the HVAC or appliance repair industry and that can allow you to write for them. For example, you could look for local home improvement blogs that can allow you to write guest posts on a topic like advising homeowners and giving them tips on how to ensure proper maintenance for HVAC or appliances.
- Interviewing local politicians is another great idea because local newspapers, bloggers and other businesses will be interested in knowing the plans of the politicians in their local town . such interviews will provide linkable assets .
- Events that generate local buzz are great for boosting your local SEO. So you may consider hosting or sponsoring events such as fundraisers, giveaways and other local events that have potential to attract backlinks from local media outlets as well as other local businesses.
- Join the local chamber of commerce because that is a great source of an authoritative backlink. Your website will not only be listed on the directory but your credibility as an air conditioner business or appliance repair business will also be greatly enhanced in the community.
It will be greatly rewarding for your local community to get talking about your business and involvement in local events. Make sure you are creating great content and also including links for your neighbors while building partnerships.
10. Make Sure That Your Business Is Listed In Local Directories
There’s a long list of online local business directories from HubSpot that your AC repair or appliance repair company can use to successfully build local citations .
Experts highly recommend use of local SEO citation tools such as BrightLocal, Moz Local and Manta among others.
11. Make Sure That Your Business Data Across The Directories Is Kept Consistent
The assurance that you are a legitimate HVAC company or appliance repair business is important to Google. It is therefore important across the entire web to maintain a consistent Business Name, Address and Phone Number (NAP) that Google can see.
Make sure any listings you have anywhere online for your business name and address are identical. For example if your address appears on your website including the word “Avenue”, in your Google My Business listing don’t write the short form of it “Ave.” because that may possibly hurt your local SEO. If you choose to include the initials “LCC” as part of your business name make sure to use that everywhere.don’t just include them on your website then omit them with your Yellow Pages or yelp listings because that will have an impact on your rankings .
The more you keep information consistent across different local citations the better the impact on your local rankings. for that reason any duplicate or old business listings should be updated or deleted . You can make use of a tool like RoboForm that helps you to add the same information across different sources of local citations so that you can maintain uniform or identical business listings.
Keeping track of your local business mentions using an Excel spreadsheet or a Google sheet is highly recommended. That will make it easier to update all your local citations in future if you ever need to change your business address or phone number.
For Google to verify the information available about your air conditioning or appliance repair company, it has to check all these other business listing sites. The goal Google has is to display information that is contextually relevant, so if it polls all these other sites and they are saying the same thing about your business listings, then Google can go ahead to confidently display it because it meets its goal.
12. Claim Your Google My Business Profile And Make Sure It Is Optimized
Asking experts to weigh in on the most important of 10 local SEO factors resulted in responses that clearly showed that an optimized Google My Business profile emerged at the top.
According to most of the experts that responded to the question, it was clear that an optimized Google My Business listing was even more important than making a business website mobile-friendly, optimizing website content or getting backlinks from other local businesses.
Recent studies have shown that about 50% of all the searches being done on search engines today are non-click, which means that the information comes from featured snippets or from Google My Business listings.
What it means to have non click searches or no click searches is that all the answers that a user will be seeking to get for their search queries will appear in the search engine results pages (SERPs), so the user will have no reason to click on anything within the search results.
Making sure that your business listing is up-to-date and complete helps you to get more people contacting your business for the air conditioner repair or appliance repair services that you provide.
Having your Google My Business listing properly optimized makes it easier for you to show up within the top three spots found in Google’s search results as shown below.
We provided below some of the best tips on how to optimize your Google My Business listing. Our experts suggest the following:
- You should make sure to fill out all the information you can for your Google My Business. It is important to add as many details as possible and also making sure you add images and get reviews from customers. This will have great impact on your local SEO and especially if you can manage to get a lot of reviews from the customers.
- You should avoid stuffing the description of your AC repair or appliance repair company because that will not influence the keyword rankings. The description should instead be used for attracting people to your business, so you should include every unique selling point or proposition that will help to set your business apart from competitors.
- Make sure that your business site URL is connected, images are optimized and all the services that your business provides as well as the other attributes of your business are included. The description of your air conditioning or a plans repair business should be compelling.
We encourage you to discover even more tips on how to optimize your Google My Business listing from some of our recent posts listed below that include great insights from various local SEO experts.
Learn more from some of our recent posts related to Google My Business:
13. Prioritize The Collection Of Customer Reviews
Online reviews of proven to have a strong correlation with search engine rankings as many experts observe. Getting a lot of positive reviews definitely helps in enhancing your business website search engine rankings.
For almost every type of business including HVAC businesses and appliance repair businesses that are essentially service area businesses, a lot of reviews can make one of the biggest contributions towards strong local SEO results. The problem with the reviews however is when some businesses or marketing agencies get into the habit of cherry-picking and strictly focusing on happy customers that only give them 5-star reviews.
However, data from some recent large-scale studies has shown a trend where businesses that have more than average reviews tend to generate 54% more revenue. In addition, businesses that have ratings within the range of 3.5 to 4.5 stars out of 5 stars actually generate higher revenues compared to businesses with ratings outside of that range.
The idea is to stop cherry-picking which might end up sacrificing a higher quantity of reviews while trying to have the perfect average rating. Every business should prioritize collection of customer reviews as part of the business process. The focus shouldn’t be on weather a customer is leaving a 5-star review or not because having a higher quantity of reviews is also important.
So you want to know how to get more reviews?
One idea that has been found out to work is to use customer feedback emails. These are sent out on a monthly basis and have been observed to generate consistent streams of Google reviews for different Google My Business pages.
The idea is to send out emails asking customers to participate in completing short surveys that focus on giving feedback on their recent experience with customer service. At the end of the survey, customers are asked if they would like to submit their Google review. This is the online reviews strategy has helped many businesses like AC repair as well as appliance repair businesses to increase the number of Google reviews that customers submit.
Every business should make it obvious to their customers that they have online business profiles and that they would appreciate customers submitting their feedback and ratings to those profiles. This can also be extended to printed marketing collateral, sticker marketing decals or labels, signage or even suggestions from staff whenever they receive positive feedback directly from customers during their interactions.
It’s a great idea when air conditining repair technicians or appliance repairmen get direct feedback from customers especially soon after providing great service, to immediately suggest to these customers how they can submit google reviews.
Any efforts that a business will make towards achieving a consistent growth of online reviews definitely impacts on its local SEO positively in a great way. It leads to more valuable feedback that can be used for continuous improvement of business services and attracting even more positive reviews and great feedback.
14. Regularly Publish Google Posts
Google Posts through Google My Business is a great way of publishing fresh content which is also available for free. With Google Posts you are able to distribute 1,500 characters for your content as long as you have a Google My Business account. You can use a Google post to publish different types of content that could include special offers, products and events.
Local businesses are increasingly making use of Google posts more than ever before and most of them have realized how these posts can make a big difference in their local marketing activities.
15. Finally, Analyze Your Main Competitors For Local SEO Strategies
One of your top priority local SEO strategies should be to perform a competitive analysis that includes top competitors ranking above you in search results for the same keywords you target.
A thorough analysis of your competitors’ SEO strategies gives you an opportunity of improving on their own strengths while also capitalizing on their SEO weaknesses. that makes it possible for you to rank above them for your local target keywords.
Consistency is key here, so you should schedule some time on a weekly basis for scouring the search results to see the keyword trends in your AC repair or appliance repair industry. Analyze all your competitor sites to measure immediately and get a better sense of the keywords working for or against them.
6 Local SEO Tools Including Resources That Will Boost Your Ranking
To help you go even further and work on your air conditioning or appliance repair business local rankings, we have provided below a list of some of the most popular local SEO tools and resources you can make use of.
- MOZ Local
- Local SEO checklist
- Synup
- WhiteSpark local citation founder
- BuzzStream
- Free Review Monitoring
1. MOZ local
MOZ local is one of the most useful local listing management tools that is used for managing, cleaning and updating business listings found cross various search engines, online directories, major aggregators and various apps in real-time.
2. Local SEO checklist
Local SEO checklist which is available for free gives you a step-by-step guidance when it comes to the optimization of your HVAC business website or your appliance repair business website for local search rankings.
3. SynUp
Synup is a popular software used for reputation management that businesses use to easily manage listings, reviews, brand image and a lot more across various major search engines as well as online directories.
4. WhiteSpark Local Citation Finder
WhiteSpark local citation finder is the tool you need for monitoring of your local citations, (online mentions of your AC repair or appliance repair local business’ name, address and phone number or NAP) for purposes of ensuring their accuracy . It is also a useful tool for conducting competitive analysis .
5. BuzzStream
BuzzStream is a tool for link building and outreach which makes it easy for users when it comes to earning local backlinks through influencers, tracking of conversations related to your air conditioning or appliance repair business and link placements that you may earn from any outreach efforts.
6. Free Review Monitoring
Free Review Monitoring is freely available and makes it easier for you when it comes to the process of monitoring of reviews for your air conditioner repair or appliance repair business across the various major online review sites available today.
With the online marketing landscape constantly changing, no ac repair business or appliance repair company should settle on an SEO strategy simply because it works. It takes more than that to achieve and maintain presence at the top spots available in local search results, so you have to make sure that at any given time you are implementing better and more effective local SEO strategies than your competitors to outrank them.
However, that is easier said than done. In order to significantly boost the chances of your air conditioning repair or appliance repair business website even ever ranking, it takes working together with proven local SEO experts. They craft and implement the right online marketing strategies for your business while taking into account all important local ranking factors that major search engines use as part of their criteria of ranking business websites in local search results. Our experts have mastered the art and science of seo for hvac contractors as well as they do for appliance repair lead generation ideas and implementation strategies that work to increase business revenue potential.
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