Don’t Gambling on Which City to Service – Here’s How to Do it
There’s a special kind of pain that comes from building a business driving 40 minutes away to do jobs in a city you don’t rank very well for, while neglecting three towns you could drive to in 20 minutes where you are the only electrician in town. Growing your business shouldn’t be a game of darts. It should be a strategic move, and that’s where seo for electricians comes in – not only to help you get found in your own backyard, but to put your flag on the ground in the three nearest suburbs to your primary location so that you get a head start on your competitors, who may be overlooking those suburbs altogether. The electricians who expand their service area aren’t always the ones with the largest crews or the fanciest trucks. They’re the ones who know the best way to get found and take calculated steps.
Growing your business geographically with SEO isn’t about simply adding more locations to your Google Business Profile and crossing your fingers. Hope is not a ranking strategy. Geographical growth is about building real authority in each new location – that is, content, citations, reviews, and signals Google can independently authenticate. It’s slower than lead generation but faster than word of mouth. It can be scalable.
Discover Where the Market’s Hot
Do some quick research before you invest time and money in a new place to see if there’s already an appetite for your product or service. Free services such as Google Trends will tell you relative search interest by location. You can get more data from a paid tool, but you can learn a lot just from this. If you’re a residential electrician and the suburb next to yours has twice the population density as your current market with half the number of established electrical contractors, that’s a place to start. If a suburb 25 miles away has a hot new construction market and your competitors are not established there, that’s a good place to start, not trying to break into a market where three of your competitors have top reviews.
The trick is to put anecdote aside. All too often electricians expand their service areas because they received a couple of good jobs from a town, not because the search data indicates a good business opportunity. Just because you get a referral from one town, that doesn’t mean the town is ready for your business. Do the homework, even if it’s not pretty.
Your Foothold is Local Landing Pages
If you’re planning to grow in a new location, the first step is to create a local landing page for that location on your website. Not a page with the city name inserted into a template – an actual page with information about that location. What is the value of your service in that area? Are you covering new subdivisions? Commercial properties? Older areas with old signs to be replaced? Write about those things, and write about those things as relevant to that particular area.
The landing page for a particular location includes the name of the city or town in the text, the services you provide in that location, the neighborhoods you serve, and your phone number and a prominent call to action. It doesn’t have to be 2,000 words. It needs to be accurate, relevant, and helpful to someone looking for an electrician in that area. Google’s pretty smart, and can tell if a page is written for people or for search engines, and it doesn’t rank very high.
If you’re targeting five new locations, create five new pages. Don’t cram them into a single “areas we service” page with a big block of text listing the city names. Each page has its own URL for Google to index and rank. Each page can rank for its own city that is more effective than one page that attempts to rank for all of them.
New Markets Need Citations
When you expand your business into a new market, your current citation profile (all those listings in directories that include your business name, address and phone number) is in your home city. In the new market, you’re starting from scratch. Google has little third-party confirmation that this business serves that city, so they’re hesitant to promote your business there (even if you have great content on your website).
To improve citations for a new territory, you get your business listed in directories and listings sites that are relevant to that territory. It could be city-specific business directories, listings with regional chambers of commerce, listings with community-specific sites, listings with trade-specific directories, and so on. The idea is to provide Google with several independent sources of information that verify that you’re in the new city. This is not sexy stuff. It’s an hour of work that will make a difference in the coming six months, which is probably why most electricians don’t do it and then get frustrated when their new local pages don’t rank.
It’s not just the quantity, it’s also the quality. All citations should use the same name, address and phone number in the same format. If you have a local number as your primary phone number, consider using a local number for the new city. Some local SEO experts believe this can be a small ranking factor for local search. Others are less convinced. At the very least, your phone number (to call you) should be published everywhere, in the same format.
The Power of Doing This the Right Way
It takes a couple of months for this approach to pay dividends in any one new market. This is enough time to turn off many electricians – they want leads now, not in 6 months. But what if you do this for 18 months, every month. You’ve established authority in three or four new search markets. You have reviews, citations, and ranking pages in each market. You have your Google Business Profile listed in the Map Pack in a much broader area than you used to. The leads coming from those markets are now free – there’s no cost per click, no retainer with an agency for that specific service, just ongoing organic search results.
The key is to set up each new market like launching a new business, with new content, new citations, a new review strategy, rather than just tacking a name on to a list and hoping that Google would know what to do.
