Rank your Plumbing Website on The First Page of Google

Remember when business pages in phone books were still a thing? Of course they still exist, but when was the last time you used one?

The books we used to find different phone numbers for residents and businesses have now turned into tools to even-out furniture or act as a coaster in a garage. Phonebooks have become increasingly obsolete over the past two decades, thanks to one word: Google.

Digital marketing is the name of the game for any business to get the word out nowadays. It’s a bit more tricky than just creating a website and throwing your feet up waiting for the business to roll in.

How well your plumbing website shows up on the search engines is a full-time job within itself. Your position in Google searches largely depends on your relationship with Google itself. If it isn’t properly maintained, your business can land on the third, fourth, or even fifth page of Google, which can subsequently bury it.

To reinforce what was said, let’s look at some statistics to show how important it is to rank high on Google searches:

• 75% of searchers NEVER click past the first page of results
• Google accounts for over 70% of desktop search traffic in the world
• The first three results on a Google search get 55% of all clicks
• 46% of all searches are local
• Google receives 13 BILLION inquires a day
• Search engines attain 300% more traffic than social media

There are many more eye-opening statistics on how much power search engines hold in terms of success to small and local businesses. To succeed with your business is to succeed on the search engines, primarily Google.

There’s a lot of rules to follow when one plays this game, but if you know them well, you’ll have a successful time playing it.

That’s what this article is for: to explain the rules and practices associated with a high search engine result.

It’s a long and arduous mountain to climb, so strap on your hiking boots, grab your pack out, and let’s get moving.

Here’s how to dominate the first page of Google!

SEO Practices

Search engine optimization is the most effective (and kind of free) way to grow better search results. You will hear the word “organic” frequently alongside the term SEO. That’s because SEO practices are in themselves an “organic” way to drum up better search results for your business.

Another word you will hear very close to SEO is “growth.” What this means is having a strong SEO presence online doesn’t happen overnight. It takes time to build a relationship with the Google algorithm.

Once you build this relationship with Google, however, you will be sitting on top of Google’s first page, which will land you in many new customers’ houses to solve their plumbing issues.

One of the first things you need to know about SEO practices is target keywords. Out of all the content that will be on your website, these words will carry the most weight. These keywords will jump out to anyone who stumbles on your content.

Target keywords are the shortest summaries of what your business is, and what you to do for the consumer.

Here are a few examples of target keywords you would find on a plumbing service’s website:

• Sewer and drain services
• Water heater repair and installation

Target keywords are not the only basic practice you need to know to get started. Having a digital marketing strategy is pivotal to growing a solid SEO foundation.

Here are the six components of SEO you need to know about before you get started:

1. Link Building
2. Content Marketing
3. Reviews
4. Web Page Structure
5. Mobile-Friendly Experience
6. Google Ads

Link Building

Did you know that 91% of all web pages never get organic traffic because they don’t have backlinks?

Link building is one of the most important aspects of great SEO practices. Think of your website as a highway. Link building is essentially building exits for different parts of your business. You can also build your credibility by tagging other reputable sources, which will increase Google’s trust in your website and your business.

There are two types of link building:

1. Internal Links
2. External Links

Internal links are a great way to keep a potential customer on your website. You should link out to as many web pages as you can on your content, including blogs and service pages.

This creates more pathways for potential customers to stay on your website and check out more of your services. Additionally, the more you practice this, the more Google will recognize your specific services, which will favor it when someone does a more specific search.

Internal links may be your best weapon in making the phrase “potential customer” to customer.

External links are links that will bring the reader to other supplemental sources on the topic they are reading. External links are a great way to back up the information on the content of your website.

The three main places externally linked are:

1. Case Studies
2. Infographics
3. Other Blogs

One of the most important things to know about external links is to NEVER link out to a competitor. This will surely drive business to them!

Content Marketing

Content is being made and uploaded to the internet every second of every day. Content is what makes the internet, and subsequently, the rest of the world, so there’s no surprise there are tactics to optimize content to help grow a business.

Content marketing will hold a place in various parts of your SEO practices, such as backlinks and overall heightened authorship score related to your relationship with Google.

Monthly blogs are a great way to flex your knowledge on your plumbing services who may not have the where-with-all to know the exact problem about their sewer or plumbing. Not only do you flex your knowledge, but it also gives the reader important advice to fix the problem and know who to call if they can’t fix it themselves.

One of the most important parts of content marketing starts right at the beginning-- The title.

A good title is everything to content. Without a good title, your content will get significantly less attention than ones with an eye-catching one.

Some examples of a great title would be

• “Common Plumbing Problems in Old Houses”
• “Your New House Can Have Plumbing Problems Too”

Reviews

Reviews are an essential part of your website’s content as they give your satisfied customers a voice to their first-hand experience with your plumbing business.

Not only do customers help your spread word-of-mouth with reviews on your business, but it also helps build and sustain your relationship with Google.

The purpose of the Google crawlers is to find the author’s intent within their content. Every customer that reviews your website has some score of authorship with Google searches. The more of these authors write well on your business, the bigger of a boost your credibility will be with Google’s algorithm.

Web Page Structure

Every single page that is found on your website is individually ranked on Google. So this does not mean you have an aggregated score on your website, but every piece of it is judged on its own.

Be sure to include your target keywords in any opportunity you have on each page of your website. This can also be said of link building as well. The more internal links you have routing to your website, the better, as it creates a solid foundation of web presence to the Google algorithm.

Mobile-Friendly Experience

55% of all internet searches are done through a mobile device. This number will increase year by year as smartphones and mobile devices exponentially rise in availability. By 2025, 73% of internet searchers will conduct them exclusively on a mobile device.

There’s no surprise to the fact that smartphones and mobile devices came into our lives and quickly created a dependence on them. Everyone in the first world has a mobile device and, if they don’t, it’s usually by choice.

This mobile device-dependent landscape indicates one thing for your business-- You have to play the game! Making your websites as mobile-friendly as possible will create success at driving optimal traffic to your business. If you don’t play the game, however, it will show the consequences.

The usual story of an unsatisfied reader visiting an underperforming website is that reader heading straight for the competition’s website.

Getting your website as mobile-friendly as possible requires only requires a couple of steps.

The first step should be to compress the images on your website. Fewer data will be needed to read the image on the website, thus making it that much faster.

Next would be to levy your website’s cache and implement accelerated mobile pages as your HTML.

Google Ads

Google Ads comes as a bit of a shortcut to ranking in Google, but at a cost--literally. If you have the extra money, though, paid ads will help you get to the top of Google searches in no time.

When someone Googles “plumbing services near me,” your page will have a much higher chance of making the top three search results.

Another net positive is that paid ads have is pay per click (PPC). The amount you pay for this advertisement is solely based on how many clicks it generates. If the ad does well, it will cost more money, but the flip side of that is the more clicks on your website generally means more business for you.

If the paid ad doesn’t work well, you don’t have to pay such a high price for its service.

In short, Google paid ads offer a low-risk investment with a high ceiling for success.

GMB Optimization

Over 50% of Google searches are of local intent. That means over half of ALL searches are looking for something that is in their area.

With this being such a high number, someone will look for plumbing services in your service area. Without proper optimization though, your business will suffer the consequences.

That’s where Google My Business or GMB comes in.

GMB is completely free and, it may come as a surprise: You probably already have an account set up! The only thing you have to do is verify it to gain access to the account. Once your account is set up, you can start the optimization process.

The more content you add to your GMB page, the better. This includes:

• Adding pictures of your services
• Linking in your website and its pages
• Allow Google Reviews
• Updating all the business info such as an address, phone number, and hours of service

Optimizing your GMB will maximize your presence on the first page of searches relevant to your business almost instantly.

Local Service Ads and Google Ads

Local service ads are a way for your business to create a direct line to customers who are searching with the intent of finding a plumbing service within their area. Having local service ads ensures that searchers will come across your website when they are looking for your specific service in your area.

Google Ads makes your target keywords pop in search engines. This type of ad will pick up any time someone locally searches your keywords, shooting you to the top of the ranks within Google’s results.

Dominate Google Searches With Triton

The hard fact about dominating the first page of Google is you need both GMB Optimization and SEO Optimization to climb the ranks for Google searches and stay there.

The other hard fact is that this is a full-time job within itself. What you should be focused on is providing the absolute best plumbing service in your area, not spending time to optimize your search presence.

That’s why you should call on Triton! We are passionate about helping small businesses dominate search engines like Google to get your company busy and working.