How to Measure SEO Success in Home Service Companies

One of the most frustrating things about search engine optimization (SEO) is how challenging it is to quantify, especially in comparison with most of the work that our clients typically handle. Sure, plumbing and HVAC systems are more complex than most homeowners realize, but the end goals are relatively simple. When the faucet is turned, does water come out? Is that vent blowing cold air?

These questions are simple to answer. On the other hand, the goals for SEO campaigns for your home services company may not seem quite as straightforward. How do you really know if SEO is working, and how can you tell whether or not it’s worth the time and money you’re investing into it? 

Even for seasoned marketers, getting clarity on progress towards SEO goals isn’t always easy. Here are a few key metrics that we suggest tracking to determine your success with home service SEO campaigns: 

Keyword-specific rankings

The term “link building” refers to an intentional campaign to get other websites to link back to your site. This specific variety of link that goes back to your page is called a “backlink.” (creative, right?)

There are many different ways to go about link building, but before we get into those strategies, it’s important to talk about one important step to avoid negative repercussions.

How NOT to do link building for home services

Note the first part of this metric: keywords. When it comes to this category of SEO metric, your focus should be on the keywords that can best help your company get visibility. It may seem cool if your business ranks for a totally unrelated keyword – possibly because of media coverage or other web content that you didn’t publish – but it ultimately doesn’t help achieve the business goals of your campaign.

It’s important to monitor your position in search engine results pages for keyword terms that matter to you and your prospects. Ideally, you’ll have this sorted out before your search optimization campaign begins. A well-organized SEO campaign will have different categories of keywords for which you want to rank highly. From there, it’s a matter of tracking your results, either with a normal search query on a normal device or with some type of keyword tracking tool. 

Backlinks

A backlink is defined as a link from another site back to your own page. Backlinks are important when it comes to SEO for home services companies because they are a key factor that search engines use to determine how relevant a page might be to users. These links often come from social media networks, but they can also be “earned” with positive coverage from sites that search engines consider authoritative – government agencies, medical research firms, etc.

Unfortunately, backlinks aren’t as easy of an SEO metric for home contractors to manage without the use of a specialized tool. It’s possible in a free tool like Google Analytics, but backlink trackers are most common as part of larger marketing or SEO suite like HubSpot, ahrefs or SEMrush.

It’s also important to be mindful of the specific places that link to your site. Respected local directories and media companies are ideal, but you don’t want your business associated with shady websites that only exist to create low-quality links. 

Organic traffic trends

The main goal of running search engine optimization campaigns is to bring in more search traffic. And the reason there’s so much emphasis on optimizing your page for search engines is because of the huge difference in the amount of organic traffic a site receives on the first page of search results compared to every other page.

In fact, even within the first page itself, the amount of traffic you get from being at the top is exponentially higher than you receive at the bottom. According to statistics by WordStream, the number-one ranked result on a search engine page has a clickthrough rate of over 36%. By comparison, the tenth and last result on a page has a clickthrough rate of just 2.2%.

That’s a faster drop than the steel coaster at your local theme park. It’s also indicative of why many different companies in so many different industries are trying to optimize their websites to get seen higher on search rankings.

Revenue

Finally, there’s one home services contractor SEO metric that stands above all: revenue. The almighty dollar. At the end of the day, this is the reason everyone is spending so much time and energy on optimizing their websites. More visibility on search engines should ultimately lead to more revenue. If you spend long enough in their realm, you’ll likely run into some digital marketers of questionable morality who insist that it’s impossible to quantify the exact revenue you get from SEO.

We think this is – to use a nice term – hogwash. Every business, no matter the size, needs to be able to quantify their return on investment (ROI) from any kind of marketing activity, even one as complex and multi-faceted as SEO. Sure, it may not be as simple as more traditional methods, but with the right model for attribution and a sufficient understanding of organic traffic, you can start to see whether or not your investment in SEO is paying off.

And if you’re not sure exactly how to get this done, we’re here to help. Click here to schedule a call with one of our HVAC & Plumber marketing specialists to find out more about how we can take a bit of the complexity out of SEO and other critical components of your digital marketing.