When you’re in the carpet cleaning business, managing your team and equipment is already a full-time job. When you throw in marketing, website management, and finding new customers, everything becomes a bit overwhelming. As you may already know, one of the biggest obstacles to gaining new customers is not showing up in search results (SERPs). Prospects are more likely to call only the first few companies at the top of SERPs and ignore the rest.
Luckily, when you take the time to fine-tune your website, marketing and attracting leads becomes much easier. We put together this Search Engine Optimization (SEO) guide so you can develop a strong website for your carpet cleaning business and understand the resources available to help you manage your online presence.
We will answer all of these relevant questions for Carpet Companies.
Does Bounce Rate Affect SEO?
What’s the Importance of Mobile Friendly Websites
What Makes a Trustworthy SEO Company?
Do Google Reviews Help SEO?
What are Social Signals?
What is Social Media Content Management?
Why Outsource Social Media Management?
SEO FAQs
Does Bounce Rate Affect SEO?
“Bounce Rate” refers to the percentage of people who visit your site and leave after only viewing one page. For example, a customer may search for “carpet cleaners near me,” click on the top result, glance at the page, and then return to SERPs to visit a different page. This is called a “bounce.”
The average bounce-rate for service-based websites (i.e. your carpet cleaning business) is around 10-30%. Though Google doesn’t explicitly look at your bounce rate when determining rank, it may look at how long someone spends on your page. The reason is simple: relevance. The longer someone stays on your website, the more valuable your website looks to Google in relation to your targeted keywords. Having a higher bounce rate won’t necessarily affect SERPs if customers are spending a lot of time on your pages.
Excessively high bounce rates coupled with short viewing times, however, can indicate deeper problems. Here are a few SEO issues to look for when your bounce rate is abnormally high:
- Slow loading speed
- Poor web page design
- Content that doesn’t connect with targeted keywords
- Poor mobile optimization
What’s the Importance of Mobile Friendly Websites?
In 2019, the number of cell phone users world wide is estimated to hit 4.68 billion. People are spending more and more time accessing websites on their phones and less time browsing the web on desktops or laptops. Last year, 63% of all website traffic was from mobile devices.
Having a mobile friendly website is so important that Google announced mobile first indexing. This means that Google now uses the mobile version of your website for rankings. If you haven’t noticed, there’s a huge difference between how websites need to be laid out on horizontal computer screens versus vertical cell phone screens.
If you haven’t updated your website’s layout in awhile, making sure you are mobile optimized should be a top priority if you want to show up in search results.
What Makes a Trustworthy SEO Company?
With everything you need to manage offline for your carpet cleaning business, it makes sense to hire an SEO company to help with managing your website so it can outrank your competition. With so many shady tactics and “hidden fees,” it’s hard to know who to trust.
Here’s what to look for when selecting a company:
- Transparency: cost and the services included should be sent to you in writing
- A solid portfolio and glowing customer reviews
- A thought-leader: any reputable SEO company will have a database of resources on it’s website to help you learn key terms and the basics of marketing
- Interest: the company should express interest in learning about your business and your customers
- Reporting: you should receive regular reports that show what’s been done and the results
Do Google Reviews Help SEO?
Reviews are like gold when it comes to growing your business. And Google reviews are the cream of the crop. Businesses with lots of 5 star reviews get more clicks and a boost in SERPs because they are seen as trustworthy and authoritative. Google favors reviews done on its site because they’re more easily verified – a customer has to be signed in to their account to leave one.
When determining local search rankings, Google considers three main factors: relevance, distance, and prominence. Relevance relates to how well someone’s search terms fit your website. Distance, of course, is the geographic region. And prominence involves your entire online presence, which includes reviews: how many you have, how often you get them, and their quality.
To help your SEO efforts, you should ask your customers regularly for Google reviews. This can be done through a simple email or with a quick reminder on a receipt.
A Quick Social Primer
Social media can have a big impact on SEO efforts because each channel can drive traffic to your website, encourage reviews, and increase the authority of your business. Here’s what you need to know.
What are Social Signals?
Social signals are basically anything you get on a social media channel: likes, shares, comments, views, mentions, etc. Having an active social media account on popular channels that are relevant for your carpet cleaning business (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube) sends “signals” to Google about your popularity. The more signals Google gets, the better your website and brand looks to SERPs.
What is Social Media Content Management?
Content is the most important aspect of your social media presence. The images and words you post are a direct representation of your brand and will either attract new followers or turn them away.
Content management involves creating a plan for your content instead of randomly posting whenever you have time. It also includes engaging with your audience and looking for new opportunities to increase reach and visibility. If you have multiple channels, management becomes even more important as you research and develop your content each month and then track results.
Why Outsource Social Media Management?
As previously mentioned, having active social media accounts is important for many reasons. Managing each channel can easily become time-consuming, taking you away from other important aspects of your business. Here are just a few of the daily and monthly tasks needed to manage your social media presence:
- Researching content ideas
- Creating images for posts
- Creating post text and implementing your hashtag strategy
- Scheduling posts
- Responding to comments
- Engaging with your audience
- Analyzing/monitoring competitor pages
- Analyzing your likes, shares and comments
Social media is a lot of work. Most businesses make the decision to outsource their social media management because they understand that it’s important but don’t have the time to do it effectively.
We hope this guide gave you some ideas for improving your SEO efforts and attracting the right customers to your carpet cleaning business.
If you’re struggling, though, and feeling overwhelmed, let us help. If you need social media help, we’ll setup and manage your social media content across all relevant channels. If you want to improve SEO, we’ll make sure your bottom line is improving within 3-6 months.
We specialize in South Florida businesses so we’re experienced with local customers and what they’re looking for.
Send us a quick message and let’s get started.