8 Best Practices For Your Regional Business

Discover eight tips to help you grow your regional business. Home service contractors with multiple business locations can refine their online presence and expand their reach using expert advice from CraftJack.  

8 Best Practices For Your Regional Business 1

Search engines and lead generation websites have made it easier than ever for regional businesses to attract customers. The internet is an astounding tool for business growth, but few contractors know how to truly harness the power of digital marketing.

Branding, market research, and consistently excellent customer service are more important than ever. With multiple channels for feedback, such as review sites and social media, and more competition, you need to work hard to stand out. Use the following eight tips to optimize your home service company's online presence.

Many regional business owners trust CraftJack for their home service lead generation. See what they have to say.


Digital Marketing For Regional Businesses

As a home service professional, you face tough competition. With so many home service contractors out there, you need to embrace marketing to succeed. Thankfully, the internet has provided small business owners with more opportunities for growth than ever. When you know how, there are a multitude of ways to reach your target audience and generate a solid pipeline of contracts.

Search engines such as Google are the main way people conduct research about products or services. You can tap into this incredible resource with search engine optimization and local SEO, which is still something of a secret weapon for regional contractors. 

Social media, lead generation websites, pay-per-click advertising, and video marketing are also highly effective ways to generate business growth online. However, to make the most of these channels, you need to have a strong brand based on market research.

What's more, you need to refine every element of your home service business to ensure you deliver an optimal customer experience. Below, you'll find advice about how to do all of the above and more. 

Can I Optimize My Business?

You certainly can optimize your business, and the best place to start is with your website. When optimizing your home improvement site, there are two key elements to consider: lead generation and SEO.

SEO is the process of optimizing your website to increase your ranking on search engine results pages, while lead generation is the process of getting contact details from potential customers. There's a lot of overlap between the two, but essentially, SEO attracts visitors and lead generation delivers the contact details of interested parties to your inbox.

It's important that you cover the technical elements of SEO. Having a secure site, loading speed, clear links between pages, and clearly organized data are all vital. Navigation should be intuitive, and the design should be clean and attractive. Keyword research is essential so you can include the necessary phrases and topics to rank in searches for your service.  

You should also craft an "About us" page, with a meaningful story about your company's background and purpose. Crucially, every webpage should logically lead to an optimized call to action that encourages the site visitor to make contact with your business or leave their contact details.

Beyond basic SEO, which is essential for any business, local SEO can be even more effective for a regional small business owner. Keep reading to learn more.

8 Best Practices For Your Regional Business 2

Best Practices For Regional Contractors

Below you can find in-depth advice about how to market your home service company and inspire growth.   

1. Brand Development & Market Research

All contractor businesses should think carefully about their brand. The more consistent your imagery, voice, personality, and style, the easier it'll be for customers to remember you. Elements such as your logo, fonts, colors, and tone of voice should be the same across all channels, from directories and social media to business cards and your website.

Keep in mind that your brand should be developed based on the preferences of your target market. If you're a new home service business, you can select a target audience based on the quality of materials you use, the personality of your leadership team, and the expertise of your team. Are you primarily working for commercial or residential clients? How wealthy are your potential customers?

Established businesses can use data about previous customers to pinpoint a target market and refine their online presence to be more appealing to it.

2. Focus On Customer Experience

Once your brand is set in stone and your company has a clearly defined audience, you're ready to go. However, having a strong brand and an excellent website aren't enough to generate ongoing growth. Outside of marketing, the most important thing you can do is deliver an exceptional customer experience.

Experts consider customer experience one of the most effective ways to differentiate your home improvement company. In the past, loyalty and word of mouth were the biggest drivers of growth and success for a local company. However, with so much choice available to people now, consumers are more selective and savvy than ever.

Anyone can type a search into Google and compare reviews from previous clients or check social media to see what people are saying about your service. Of course, you should deliver excellent customer service for the sake of doing a great job, but the stakes are much higher in today's consumer-led marketplace if you don't.

3. Local SEO And Multiple Business Locations

A very high proportion of the population use local searches to find home service contractors, such as:

  • "HVAC technician near me"
  • "Plumbers in New York"
  • "Local landscape gardeners"

When someone enters this type of search into Google, the search engine offers tailored results based on the location of the searcher. As a local small business, this is one of the easiest ways to get to the top of the SERPs. The main areas of local SEO to optimize include:

  • Optimized Google Business Profile
  • Targeted local keywords in title tags, headers, and metadata
  • Strategically placed exact topical keywords and phrases and semantic keywords and phrases
  • Geo-targeted keywords
  • Schema markup
  • Prominently displayed business name, address, and phone number on your website
  • Optimized website images
  • Website optimized for mobile devices
  • SEO-optimized sitemap

You'll also need to add locally optimized content to your website, which you can find out more about further down in this article.

When it comes to multiple service locations, there are three key elements of local SEO we explore in depth below: your Google Business Profile and optimized landing pages for services and locations.     

Google Business Profile

If you're a contractor company with multiple service locations, you should create a Google Business Profile for each one. This innovative tool lets you control how your company profile appears on Google Search and Google Maps. It's also a very easy way to send your company website climbing up the SERPs when it comes to local searches.

When you type a local search into a search engine, a list of claimed businesses appear in the local pack. These are the three results that appear at the top of the SERP underneath a map that links to Google Maps if you click through.

To get into the local pack for every location you operate within, you should perfectly optimize each profile. This includes:

  • Optimizing your listing title
  • Optimizing business categories
  • Ensuring your name, address, and phone are consistently listed
  • Adding website links
  • Setting accurate business hours
  • Creating an optimized company description
  • Uploading business images
  • Verifying your listing
  • Generating positive Google reviews

Optimized Pages For Each Location

For contractors with multiple locations, creating optimized landing pages is essential. Google's algorithm crawls websites to find information it deems relevant to local search engine users. The more specific and thorough your website is, the more likely Google is to rank it highly in relevant local searches.

Geo-targeting is particularly important, as local SEO is probably the easiest way to get your website in front of potential customers. This means including location-specific keywords, a location-specific "About us" page, linking to authoritative local sources, and testimonials from local people. For example, if you have locations in Chicago and Peoria, you’d create pages for each city with unique content and keywords to match searchers from those areas. 

These geo-targeted location pages don't necessarily need to be prominently displayed. Their purpose is to drive website traffic to your website based on the intent of local search engine users. That said, they should still be expertly written and equally optimized for search engines and web users.

Optimized Pages For Each Service

While most local contractors have a website these days, many make the mistake of creating a single home page and vaguely listing all the services they provide. Creating a landing page for every service you provide increases relevancy, improves your ranking, and expands your reach. 

Google prioritizes long-form content that offers maximum value to web users. As such, the more relevant content you provide about the services you provide, the higher search engines rank your site. 

Keywords should always be natural and make sense within the context of a sentence. Google's algorithm checks the quality and readability of all content, so excellent writing is just as important as SEO. 

4. PPC For Regional Contractors

Paid search advertising is a crucial element for many successful local contractors. While local SEO can be implemented relatively quickly, other aspects of SEO are more long-term approaches to inspire growth. PPC, on the other hand, delivers results instantly.

PPC ads appear at the very top of search engine results, while paid social ads appear strategically on people's social media feeds. Paid ads are an important part of many companies' digital marketing strategies. 

5. Home Service Ads For Regional Contractors

In addition to general PPC, Google Local Service ads are an awesome tool for home service professionals. This type of ad is only available to a limited number of industries, one of which is contractors.

These ads display even higher up the SERPs, above PPC ads, and provide contact details for web users to get in touch. As such, you only pay for this type of ad when a lead converts instead of when they click. 

6. Content Marketing For Home Service Contractors

Content creation is one of the best ways to get ahead of your competitors and attract web users to your home service website. Many small business owners still aren't aware of the power of content marketing or don't know how to do it in a cost-effective way. However, done right, it's one of the cheapest and most effective long-term strategies for growth.

In addition to including relevant keywords, topics, and geo-targeted links and content, blog posts, articles, e-books, how-to guides, and press releases add genuine value to users. You can post content to your website, social media, and guest blogs and send it directly to your customers' inboxes via email. 

Content is a great way to attract new website visitors as well as staying fresh and relevant in the eyes of people you've done work for previously.   

7. Local Directories For Contractors

Online directories such as Yelp, Angi, Houzz, and the Better Business Bureau are vital for contractors. These websites frequently display towards the top of the SERPs, making them a great way to increase website traffic. Some listings are paid while others are free, so be sure to get into as many as you can afford.

8. Testimonials & Reviews

Testimonials are super-important to potential customers for building trust and letting potential customers know the value of choosing you for their home improvement project. Think of testimonials, online reviews, and other positive feedback displayed online about your company as the modern form of word of mouth.

Never be shy about reaching out to a delighted customer and asking them for a review or testimonial. In case of a negative review, always respond and provide contact details to resolve issues, and remain polite and respectful in all interactions, online and off-line.

See what our customers have to say about CraftJack. Watch customer testimonials

How Can I Grow My Business?

Growing your business ultimately relies on giving customers the best possible service you can. By consistently exceeding expectations, being personable, and doing a top-notch job, you'll be in the best position to grow. But being the best you can be isn't enough to facilitate growth.

By tapping into the resources and best practices mentioned above, you can build a steady pipeline of leads, impress customers with your excellent service, and generate reviews to facilitate further growth.