Instead… take the type to fully take in mind these 3 crucial components to your home services business website, and win more business, more easily, every time.

1. Focus on the customer with reviews and testimonials

Your home service business lives and dies by what your customers say about you. One particularly powerful way to ⚡️ charge up your marketing, is by working the key themes you’re seeing from your reviews all through your headlines and website copy. Besides this, of course, you should feature direct quotes and photos of happy customers, and even videos whenever possible.

Always make your website headlines focused on the customer, and their problems – instead of your company.

This one powerful switch could turn your home services marketing strategy into a powerhouse.

2. Draw attention the next step you want them to take and make it easy

Home services marketing is not sexy generally. People aren’t trying to go to 20 pages on your site before calling you, or submitting a service request.

That’s why we believe the ‘call-to-action’ as we call it, should be front and center, and grab as much attention as possible. This may seen as a little pushy in some industries, but in home services marketing, it’s actually what potential customers want.

They want it to be simple, and obvious.

We love to do that by featuring the full form, right away – on every selling page. Some home services businesses make them go to a 2nd page before allowing a homeowner to contact them, but as a homeowner, I want it to be as simple and as easy as possible.

3. Create ‘buckets of content’ and make sure your website is always expanding

Home services companies that want to get as many local customers as possible from search engines, will utilize ‘buckets of content’ so they have as much ‘bait’ out on the internet attracting potential customers as part of their search engine optimization.

Search engine optimization actually starts in the website design process:

• Creating deep enough web pages so search engines actually know what each page is about.

• Including the right local schema and meta data for local SEO, to capture local searches

• Including different pages for each of their home services, and ensuring their is easy navigation with minimal clicks to get to each one of them so potential customers can get the info they need quickly.

Take in mind this is only a beginning, and you must have a ton of other basics like including your licensing and insurance information if that’s part of the law in your area of the country for a home services business.

How to Take Control Over Your Own Social + Video Marketing for your Home Services Business

Not every marketing tactic makes sense for a marketing agency to help with. We believe it’s very difficult for an outside agency to do social media better than you can, internally.

Trust us! We’ve tried, but here’s the low-down on getting the most out of your social media marketing.

Why you should be doing your social media in-house

So much of what makes home services business social media marketing actually fresh and relevant is:

• On the fly photos of the team, customer wins, and before and after photos of real jobs.

• Videos of raving fans sharing their experience

• Behind the scenes of the team, or problems around real jobs as you’re seeing them.

When we used to do social media for clients, we found that the extra step of them uploading pictures and videos to Google drive, and us then downloading it and putting it up on social media, wasn’t adding as much value as we would’ve hoped. We strongly suggest taking this component of your home services marketing strategy, in-house.

When you create great social media ideas, and videos – you should also distribute those through email marketing, and so you can kill 2 birds with one stone.

7 ideas for home services marketing social media you can do over and over again

1. Problems with the home services industry, your niche, or a particular job.

2. Before and afters: tell the story, and make the homeowner the hero.

3. Champion someone on your team, have a photo of them in their element, and say why they’re awesome!

4. Why you love the home services industry, and giving kudos to another local home services company that is in the area and why they do right by homeowners. (Referral partnerships anyone?)

5. If you’re doing Google local services ads, or Google guaranteed, BBB or Angie Super service awards, or any other certifications, share the badge with your logo and what you’re doing to level up your service on a regular basis. Always bring attention back to third-party verification of your services. “Don’t take it from us!”

6. “Caught doing it right” videos – when something goes wrong on a job, do you cover it up? No! You do a ‘caught doing it right’ video about how you handle things when they go wrong. You fix them! Make a habit of showing anyone who follows you on social media platforms, will always fix your mistakes.

7. Inspirational, Motivational, and Gratefulness – “people won’t remember what you said or did, but they’ll remember how you made them feel.” Can you make them feel inspired?

Home Services Industry Video marketing made simple in a way that helps sales

Video creation doesn’t have to be complicated – quick write down:

• The last 10 objections customers have had to working with your company.

• The top 7 questions in the sales process.

• Any and every question around cost, ‘why you’re more expensive than your competitors,’ and any topic ideas you could address that would demystify and reduce anxiety for your IDEAL CUSTOMER, related to pricing.

Now make videos about every single one of those topics.

If you’re like many other home services businesses, you may be reluctant to actually do it, but I want you to know – this is the real content, customers want so see from your home services business. The only reason most home services marketing doesn’t talk about these things is because it’s hard.

Has doing the hard things for digital marketing ever made you money before? The reason making these types of videos will make you more money than most home services marketing strategies – is because customers don’t just want fluffy content from the home services sector.

The want the real stuff from their home services providers. They want the stuff most local businesses are scared to talk about. The funny thing about sharing this stuff on your social media pages, it can also help your company in the search engine results if you turn it into blogs.

If you do the hard stuff in your marketing strategies most home service professionals are too scared to touch, it will help your online reputation, it will show up in your customer testimonials, and it will make digital advertising easier.

3 Crucial Tactics for Home Services SEO

You want more prospective customers to find you on search results?

Perhaps you’ve realized as a home services provider, like Tommy Mello say’s “Google is God when it comes to home services.” (Well at least when it comes to digital marketing!)

Search engines in 2023 need more than just business listings, content marketing, and 20-30 reviews to let you show up at the top of local search. The bar has gone up significantly.

Home Services Businesses Content marketing is powerful but keyword strategy is a must

You can’t just put out little blogs anymore… that was the OLD digital marketing landscape.

Back in the day 200-300 words would cut it, but in today’s local SEO landscape “91% of all blogs on the internet have 0 traffic” according to Hubspot.

• That’s why you first need to do research to see what people are actually searching. We suggest the tools Ahrefs or SEMRush to do this, and you can see how many people are searching a specific phrase.

• If you guess first for instance I could enter “Home Services Marketing Important” into Google find that the top result is an industry leader talking about home service companies, and I take the URL for that page and put it into Ahrefs or SEMRush and see what keywords it’s ranking for that have high ‘search volume’, meaning many people search them each month.

• I could then optimize the content I’m writing for those terms. Utilizing a tool like Surfer SEO. Surfer SEO helps analyze the top results for a particular term and compete with that page by nudging you to include different keywords, topics, or images more often as to ‘beat’ the current top result.

All of this, is part of keyword strategy – and keyword strategy is a crucial component of internet marketing at this point in the game.

Getting more and better links from around the web is like garnering votes

Google is a better search engine than most – because it mastered the art of crawling the web and analyzing backlinks.

A backlink is basically any link on any webpage – that directs you to another page, whether on the site you’re on, or on a different site.

• At first, Google would see if a site had a lot of links to it, and if it did – they would rank it higher.

• But as early internet pirates gamed the system, they made it much more sophisticated and used what they called “PageRank” to make more important websites links count for much more than less important sites.

• Now – getting links from more important websites is a huge game, that search engine optimization specialists play at crazy scale, particularly in home services industries.

Many home services companies will ignore this particular game in online marketing, and instead just go the paid ads route, get online reviews, and provide great customer service.

The funny thing is – even with all of that, without solid backlinks – these companies will generally not show up in as many organic search results as they deserve. Getting qualified leads from organic SEO in 2023, requires all 3 of these crucial components of SEO are in place – including earning backlinks.

Faster, Better, Stronger: How to make your site quicker + well ordered for Google

Imagine potential clients land on your website…

• How long does it take to load?

• How can they navigate to the different services you provide?

• Do you have enough information about each service, so they can make an educated decision about whether your company could help them solve their specific problem?

• Do you have your service area clearly outlined on your website for new customers, and do you have ‘city landing pages’ for each of the cities you serve, so new customers googling ‘their city + your service’ could find you through Google search?

These are a few of the things that make up good structural components of technical SEO and on-page SEO for a home service business.

Of course – at Hook Agency we build these things into every website we do for our clients, but if you build your site to address these things, your marketing strategies will go further because your site will be more visible on search engines.

3 Killer Tips for Getting More Out of Your Google Ad Campaigns

DO NOT – let Google ‘auto-apply recommendations’ on your account. Go into your settings, and turn that off immediately.

There is a fine line between letting Google help you in all the ways it’s good at, and accidentally letting Google spend all your money on things that won’t make you money.

Google ads are much better when you have someone watching them regularly to stop them from spending on stuff that’s not going to get you customers…

The first pillar: well organized campaigns allow Google’s AI to help you

You want to have campaigns for the different services you provide, so that within each of those campaigns Google’s artificial intelligence will start using conversion data to utilize the headlines and components that are actually working more.

This is why we always want to provide all of the headline options, and variations that we possibly can, so the ‘multivariate testing’ can do it’s magic.

Getting too far in the deep end? Don’t worry! That’s why your home services business may opt to have a home services marketing agency like ours, take this off your plate and rest assured we’re learning from all of our other clients and applying those lessons to your ads.

The second pillar: healthy budgets, tight but not too tight targeting, and regular maintenance

Many people simply are not putting enough budget in each campaign. If you have less than $50 or at least $30 a day in your campaigns, you’re simply not going to get enough data to let the ad platform optimize your spend.

Similarly, some lee-way on targeting allows you get some help from Google’s optimization, but you always want to provide enough to start it off on the right foot. That balance is where it’s good to have a partner that lives on this platform all day.

Finally, adding ‘negative keywords’ is crucial to not spending on things you don’t want to show up for.

Digital marketing for a home services company is not ‘set it and forget it’ but unfortunately, many agencies run it that way.

The third pillar: Don’t forget how important the landing page is

A huge mistake is sending prospective customers to your home page.

Your digital marketing campaigns and ppc advertising should always send customers to targeted landing page, that relates to the ad they just clicked.

You will get more phone calls for your home service company if you don’t neglect these pages, and instead spend as much or more to make them effective initially as you spend in a month or two trying to send advertising clicks to those pages.

Also… if you haven’t tried local services ads yet, do that before you even hire a home services marketing agency.

A Powerful Home Services Marketing Strategy to Dominate

The ideal home services marketing plan will:

• Utilize videos and other social media platforms to make satisfied customers the hero of the story.

• Leverage every offline avenue available to it’s fullest extent like iconic naming and branding, truck or van wraps, job site branding

• Identify 3-5 ‘Themes’ to hammer over and over again in your messaging, whether it be in your videos, email marketing, social media pages, online marketing, or print marketing strategies. (Example 3 Themes: ‘We value all customer feedback,’ ‘Easy to communicate with on your mobile devices and text’, and ‘Quick and Clean the first time.’)

• Create a weekly checklist to ensure your marketing manager has clarity on the activities expected and at what rhythm they should be completed.

• Create a powerful connection with a home services marketing agency that actually understands how leverage a beautiful custom website, SEO / content marketing to get more leads, ppc advertising strategies they’ve learned from working with 100’s of home improvement services companies.

• Constantly pushing getting more reviews on all marketing channels to showcase your high quality services, and utilizing those through your website and your paid advertising.

We’d love to help accelerate your home services digital marketing strategy, get you more and better qualified leads, and help you get higher on search results.

Every single day, more and more homeowners find home service companies through local search in your service area.

If you’d like Hook Agency to help you get more new customers through SEO, Content Marketing, Business Listings, Paid Ads, and helping you get more and more satisfied customers – we’d love to help.

We generally only work with the best of the best though – so ask yourself… is that you?