5 Steps Every Service Business Can Take to Get More Website Traffic & Sales

Every roofing/plastic surgery/legal/accounting company wants to get more business from their website. After all, that’s the point of having one, right? So what do you do after you’ve published a website (we hope!) and you’re simply not getting the number of clients you thought you’d get from being online? Well, there are a few things you can do to both increase your traffic and increase the number of people that contact you .

So, how can you get some of these results for yourself, even if you DIY it? Here we go!

First off is increasing traffic. If you don’t have traffic coming to your website, nobody will be there looking to contact you. There are a few ways to get traffic – namely advertising and search engines. If you don’t want to constantly spend money advertising, the best way to get long-term, steady traffic to your website is by ranking well in search engines, aka Google. If nobody can find you when they search (your services) in (your city), then you have a problem. Here’s what you can do about it.

1. Optimize your page titles and meta tags
Every page on your website has a title and meta description in the code. Optimize these by including the name of the service listed on the page along with your hometown in each one. For example, if you’re offering roofing in Phoenix, your homepage title should be something like “Top Roofing Services in Phoenix | Company Name” and your meta description should be a quick description of what you offer. This same method can be used for your other pages that discuss roof repairs, commercial roofing, etc. If you want to get a bit more advanced, you can research the top ranking competitors and see what they’re doing to win before you start changing your own tags.

2. Make sure your website is responsive (mobile-friendly)
This one is really important for 2 reasons. The first is that Google actually released an update last year that actually penalizes your website rankings in mobile search if it’s not mobile friendly. The second is that mobile search is completely taking over desktop search, especially for local services. So if you want to be found (and you’re reading this, so you do!) you need to make sure your website is responsive. You can hire a developer to do this, or if you’re on WordPress, move to a responsive WordPress theme. Not sure where to turn for help? You can always get in touch with us – 100% of our clients’ websites are responsive, because we always keep up with Google’s requirements.

3. Get rid of all of your website errors
For this, you can check Google Webmaster Tools or use a crawling tool like Screaming Frog. You’ll want to make sure you repair any errors such as 404 pages, as Google frowns on these, and paying customers may be landing on them as well.

4. Make sure your Google Maps listing is filled out with the correct info and linked to your website.
If you’re a local service provider without a claimed Google maps listing, you’re gonna have a hard time. First, make sure you have a solid, consistent NAP (Name, Address, Phone number) format. Then make sure your Google listing has this exact information along with a link to your website, a description of your services, and some relevant photos.

5. Last but not least, citations & backlinks: They’ll make or break you
The last thing you need to make sure to have after all the above is said and done is consistent citations and strong, relevant, healthy backlinks. The best thing you can do to help yourself with this is to make sure your consistent NAP (that we mentioned above) is listed everywhere you can in local search directories. These are websites like Yelp, the Yellow Pages, Manta, etc. With an SEO campaign, we can handle this for you, but it can be done manually as well. Just list yourself everywhere you can. You can even do optimization  within websites like Yelp. 
For backlinks, try to leave blog comments on relevant blogs, get guest posts by reaching out to blog writers, and sponsor any local events that come up.

Once you have a decent flow of traffic coming to your website, you need to make sure people can reach you. This would seem like an obvious thing, but you’d be surprised how many websites do not make it easy to contact them, especially if the website isn’t mobile friendly and someone has landed on it from their phone. The best thing you can do is put your phone number and email address right at the top of your website, and make the phone number a click-to-call link that way nobody has to go back and forth between their browser and their calling app.

All of this will help to increase your search rankings over time, and ultimately increase the amount of business you get from your website. It’s not easy, but it does work. If you need an expert’s help or you just don’t have time to do it all, please reach out to us and we’d be happy to give you a free consultation to see if our marketing plans can fit your needs!