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5 Tips to Improve SEO for Your Service-Based Business

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Service-based businesses drew the short end of the stick for displaying their offerings online. Unlike product-based businesses that can create galleries of their products to help users visualize what they’ll be purchasing, your business doesn’t have a clear, laid out path to showcase your service’s value.

Sure, there are testimonials, before-and-after images, and other ways to demonstrate your authority and skillset, but getting someone to your website to view these is half the battle.

That’s why service-based companies need to consider search engine optimization (SEO) as a part of their marketing strategy. If you’re not sure where to start, take a look at these top tips to improve your website’s SEO.

Follow All General SEO Rules

These rules are applicable for all businesses that want to improve their site’s SEO, not just service-based companies. Here’s a shortlist of the must-have rules to follow:

  • Avoid duplicating content. Search engines will know you’re doing it, so don’t think you can trick them! Repeating the same content over and over in multiple places on your website will not help your SEO at all. Duplicate content also applies to copying your competitors’ content. In general, focus on creating unique, high-quality content (more on this later).
  • Submit your sitemap. Sitemaps show search engines a list of all the pages that live on your website. To see if you have one, they’re usually located at yourdomain/sitemap.xml. If you have a WordPress website, there are plugins to help you create this. If not, there are free sitemap generators online to assist. 
  • Create page titles and meta descriptions. This content is what you see on a search engine results page (SERPs) that links to the websites that meet your search query. Without adding these manually, search engines will decide what to pull, which will look sloppy.  
  • Integrate keywords into specific content. If you know what keywords to utilize in your content, make sure it’s integrated into the body copy, headlines, page titles, meta descriptions, and other on-page areas. Avoid keyword stuffing and aim to have your content read naturally (and not robotic). 

Focus on Quality Content

High-quality content will always win the SEO game. Period.

What do we mean by this? All of the content on your website should be:

  • Relatable to your business and be of interest to your audience
  • Written like a human and doesn’t sound robotic
  • Helpful, purposeful, and provide value to your audience
  • Original and unique (not duplicated)

Also, it’s worth mentioning that search engines also love fresh content, so having a way to produce new, valuable content needs to be a part of your strategy. A blog is an excellent way to satisfy this “search engine craving” (more on that later).

While writing high-quality content is a lot of work and may take some time for you to see the payoff from it, it’s an effort that will pay off greatly in the long run.

Create Dedicated Pages for Each of Your Services

Many service-based businesses have one page on their website that lists out all the services they offer. While you may think it’s nice to have all of this information in one place, you’re missing out on an easy opportunity to boost your SEO.

For example, let’s say you have an auto detailing business. Besides offering professional auto detailing services, you also provide glass repair, window tinting, and auto sound and security services. If you listed all of your services on one single page, you could be missing out on exposure to someone who would want one or more of these services.

Remember, search engines do not rank websites as a whole; they rank individual pages. When you create a single page with all of your services, search engines see this page as too general and don’t have a clear understanding of how to rank it, which results in a low ranking.

Lastly, if you’ve performed keyword research and have a strong keyword for each of your services, creating individual service pages is a great way to optimize your website.

Build a Blog to Position Yourself as an Industry Leader

As stated, search engines love fresh content, and a blog is the go-to way to contribute new insight, ideas, and information to your target audience.

Not only will a blog help with your SEO efforts, but this is your place to also position yourself as a leader within your industry. 

If you’re trying to think of topics for your blog, a great place to start is by thinking about what your customers are most interested in. Or, think about their biggest struggles and how your services can rid them of this stress. 

By taking this solution-based approach for your blog, people will come to your blog over your competitors because you’re offering something of value to them. 

Consider a Thorough FAQs Page

A big difference between product-based businesses and service-based businesses is how they position their offering. While product-based businesses can let the products and their features speak for themselves, service-based businesses need to demonstrate their expertise and authority through information. 

A great place to start building trust with potential customers and showcasing your expertise is through a frequently asked questions (FAQs) page. This will help your SEO not only because you are creating more content for search engines to review, but you’re also setting yourself up to be showcased in Google’s featured snippet box.

Much like all things related to organic SEO, this is a long-form strategy that will take some time for you to see success with. 

Ready to Improve Your SEO?

No matter what industry you’re in, you can take advantage of these SEO tips for your service-based business!

To get more details on how to improve your website’s SEO, get in touch with us today.  

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Brooke Desmond

Communications Manager
With a passion for all things digital marketing, Brooke aims to give a unique perspective on the latest trends and ideas in this ever-changing space.

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