Carpet Cleaning Marketing and Website Development
Anybody can have a website but having one that works well is a different story. It’s all very good to have a flashy intro and lots of features and functionality that can wow the audience on every single page. But what if they can’t find you? What if you’re not visible on the first page of search engine results? If they don’t know your web address (which most users don’t), many members of your potential audience are going to try to find your site (or a competitors) by typing in a keyword or phrase, and if you don’t rank on those return results, you may as well not have a Web site at all. It’s that serious.
Making your web site “search engine friendly” or employing Search Engine Optimization techniques or SEO, as it’s known in the trade, at your earliest convenience should be a priority.
To ignore Search Engine Optimization is folly. Without quality SEO, well, if we were a betting company (which we are), we’d say your dead in the water. Your Web site, if it is to be relied upon as a catalyst to bring new customers to your company, is nothing if it isn’t optimized for the web. In fact, ignoring SEO is tantamount to placing a brick wall against your front door; you’re actually blocking potential customers from reaching you. You’re web site is destined to become part of the “noise” of the Internet rather a viable choice for likely customers.
Search Engine Optimization, to be successful, has three components. If your website is lacking in any of the three areas, you’re leaving money on the table:
Quality content linked to your site’s title and keywords
Site optimized for all major search engines (not just Google)
Quality backlinks and tags
Recently Sovran Communications Group was hired by a large carpet cleaning and water restoration service company to increase their customer base via the internet. Even though this company ranked on page 1 of Google and Yahoo for the search terms “carpet cleaning” and “water damage” (we then included the city they operate in as the third keyword in the search terms), they ranked on page 5 with Bing. While this company also offers tile and upholstery cleaning, mold remediation, reconstruction services, etc., when using these additional services in search terms, they failed to rank anywhere near page 1 of any search engine. Basically their “competitors were killing them if the potential customer did a web search and used any search term other than “carpet cleaning” or “water damage.”
In the above example, this client’s “SEO” person (purportedly an “industry expert” that dabbles in SEO) made several major SEO errors. This “industry expert” failed to take into account the client’s market area, competitors, services offered, site structure, and web copy. This “expert” convinced the customer to invest heavily into “Google AdWords” while failing to address or even understand the underlying problem the client was having in the first place.
Over the last couple of months Sovran Communications Group has cost effectively restructured this client’s web presence. We’ve taken into consideration their competitors strengths and weaknesses and “one up’ed them.” We’ve changed copy where appropriate, changed keywords, added meta data, created backlinks and made their site inviting and search engine friendly. As of this morning, we’re happy to report that this client now ranks Number 1 with Google, Number 1 with Yahoo and Number 2 with Bing. Their traffic has increased (based on Google Analytics) threefold and they’re landing new clients.
Sovran Communications Group is a marketing and consulting agency exclusively representing the carpet cleaning and restoration services industry. For more information on our company and a FREE website evaluation, please visit us online at www.SovranCommunications.com.
Thirty-three percent of Internet users perceive a company in the top search engine rankings to be a trusted source. Where do you rank?
