Local Pest Control Companies Need a Strong SEO Strategy to Compete With the Big Guys

Local Pest Control Companies Need a Strong SEO Strategy to Compete With the Big Guys

There are plenty of reasons someone might do a Google search for a certain kind of insect or rodent.  For example, kids who, in preschool, enjoyed playing with Reya the red panda’s bug habitat on the Khan Academy Kids app may enjoy doing Google searches for beetles, dragonflies, and bees once they get old enough to know how to type the names of these creatures.  Likewise, the owners of pet snakes search online to find the best prices on frozen mice to feed to their zero-legged friends, and the owners of pet rats turn to Google to find out whether it is safe to share the arugula from their dinner with Templeton.  In other words, not all Internet searches about roaches, termites, ants, mice, and rats are about pest control, but some of them are, and Google knows the difference.  As a local pest control business, you face an uphill battle in drawing attention to your company when customers can easily choose to hire nationwide companies that also provide pest control services.  Word-of-mouth advertising helps, but you need a strong digital marketing strategy, including search engine optimization (SEO) to make your website appear in a prominent position in response to relevant Google searches.  Rather than trying to learn SEO from scratch, it is better to hire High Converting Media to develop and implement an SEO strategy for your pest control business.

Choosing the Right Mix of Style and Substance to Appeal to Prospective Customers and to Google

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the complex process of inducing Google to rank your website highly among the results of searches related to the subject matter of your site.  Google is always changing its algorithms to determine more effectively which sites will be the most valuable to users.  Therefore, SEO advice from several years ago is out of date, and if you start learning SEO now, you will need to constantly adjust your strategy; this is just the nature of the Internet.  For example, Google pays attention to the following metrics to determine the desirability of your site:

•   Readability of content
•   Keywords relevant to the search term
•   Frequent updates to content
•   Links to other related sites and to other pages on the same site
•   Number of previous visitors to the site
•   Average time that users spend on the page
•   Conversion rate (users clicking on the company’s phone number or online content form through the site)

One of the many factors that Google considers is search intent.  For obvious reasons, pest control companies should optimize their sites for searches with a commercial intent, that is, searches by customers that need to hire a pest control company.  These are searches like “pest control Fort Myers” or “how to get rid of termites Shreveport.”  Commercial searches for pest control companies almost always include the names of geographic areas, because it does not help you to find a pest control company in Vermont if you are suffering from a cockroach infestation in Texas.

It is in your interest, however, to optimize your pest control business website for informational searches, too.  If your site contains pictures of the various pests found in your area, with information about each species, the site will receive plenty of visits from people who need to hire a pest control service in the immediate future and from those who do not.  You should include content on your site that will cause Google to route users to you with questions like “what kind of bug is this,” “are the ticks in West Virginia dangerous,” and “mosquito borne diseases in the United States.”

SEO for Local Businesses Is Its Own Skill

Your job is to identify bugs, get rid of them, and prevent them from coming back.  Our job is to optimize your website so that customers who need you to do those things can easily find it.  Local pest control businesses cannot afford not to invest in professional SEO if they want to compete with the other pest control businesses in their area. High Converting Media offers SEO services for local businesses by professional WordPress developers and digital marketing experts.