Websites aren’t enough for tradies to succeed online – or at least, not anymore.
As more and more tradies are beginning to understand, it isn’t enough to simply be online if nobody is finding or calling your tradie business.
One of the most important things in tradie digital marketing is visibility. Your website may look fantastic, sure… but if nobody can find it, it isn’t really doing anything, is it?
That’s what SEO (search engine optimisation) is all about. Little wonder that it’s become the most important part of online tradie marketing – even more so than websites for tradies!
If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you’ll no doubt understand that there are a lot of considerations that go into determining whether or not your website ranks and is visible to your customers.
Not to mention, there are also countless factors that can stop your site from ranking as well!
Why is your tradie website not ranking?
We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again: the higher you rank on Google’s search pages and the greater the number of pages you rank for, the more phone calls you’re going to receive.
Say you’re a plumber. A lot of your calls are going to be for emergency jobs – burst pipes, gas leaks, etcetera.
People who are looking for a plumber to fix these aren’t going to put a lot of thought into researching plumbers – instead, they’ll probably just call the first plumber they can find.
The first plumber they find… in other words, the first plumber that pops up on Google!
Tradie websites that rank highly are going to get more business, full stop. This isn’t just guesswork, either – according to industry research, results on the first page account for a whopping 75% of all clicks!
Wondering why you aren’t getting as many calls and enquiries through your website? It’s probably because your site isn’t ranking that well. Here are a couple possibilities…
Your tradie website not indexed in Google
For Google to rank your web pages, it has to index them first.
Needless to say, a tradie website that hasn’t been indexed by Google will most likely not appear in search engine results!
These are plenty of issues that can cause this problem. Unfortunately, we don’t have time to go through all of today – luckily, Neil Patel has a pretty good list you can read up on.
By resolving these issues, your tradie marketing team can reduce errors on your tradie website, allowing it to be indexed (and therefore show up on Google searches!)
When setting up your website, be sure to uncheck or not tick off the Search Engine Visibility box – if you do so, you’ll be blocking search engines from finding your tradie website.
Once the issue is fixed, we’ll submit a request to Google to have your website recrawled and reindexed – while Google does periodically recrawl websites, there can often be months between crawls!
Your site isn’t mobile-friendly
To enhance the user experience (and your SEO performance), it’s important that your tradie website is as mobile-friendly as possible.
That’s because it’s believed a total of 84% of Australians own and use smartphones every day. For many, their phones have completely replaced computers as their primary internet-enabled device.
This trend is reflected in internet usage as well, with mobile internet usage surpassing desktop in 2016.
To accommodate for this, Google has tweaked its search algorithm to give greater weight to prioritise mobile-friendly sites over those that aren’t.
Needless to say, if your tradie website isn’t mobile friendly, it isn’t going to rank very well!
If you first got your tradie website built years ago, it may be time for an upgrade!
Our team has plenty of experiencing updating websites for tradies – and that includes making them mobile friendly. That’s just one of the many tradie marketing services we can offer you!
Content lacks in quality and frequency
There’s a saying in the digital marketing world: content is king.
We aren’t just talking about ad copy and slogans, either – content is one of the most important parts of SEO and tradie marketing!
There are a couple of reasons.
For starters, content helps “sell” your services and business. It communicates your skills and know-how – exactly what people are looking for in a tradie.
Your content should support claims about your skills and know-how. For example, if you’re an electrician, you might create content about the intricacies of rewiring a house, or new electrical safety regulations.
More importantly however, a steady stream of well-written, original content is exactly what Google looks for when ranking web pages, as Google takes this as a sign that you know what you’re talking about!
Have you ever wondered why every time you look up a recipe or a how-to guide it always opens with the writer’s life story?
The reason is simple: it helps them to rank.
However, it isn’t just cooking websites that can rank using this technique – so too can tradies such as yourself.
That’s why so many tradies regularly update their websites and have entire sections dedicated to regular blogs – simply put, it helps push them up in Google’s results page!
Long loading times
How long do you wait for a site to load before giving up and hitting the back button? 10 seconds? 5? 3?
Even if your personal tolerance for loading might be quite generous, Google’s isn’t. According to Google itself, its algorithm uses page speed as a ranking factor in mobile search results.
And with mobile search and desktop search continuing to harmonise, it’s little surprise that loading speed can affect rankings across desktop searches as well!
Not to mention, a long page load time may also cause you to lose impatient potential callers.
Marketing and websites for tradies that work!
As you can see, marketing for tradies involves a lot of work and specialised knowledge. Between emergency callouts, urgent repairs and upcoming contracts, few tradies have the time to learn and implement all the things that you’ll need to rank well on Google.
Luckily, you don’t have to!
At iformat, we’re specialised in tradie SEO. Our mission is to help tradies like yourself enjoy more leads and phone calls:
- For the jobs you want
- From the customers you want
- In the areas you want
We elevate websites for tradies – and yours can be one of them!
Contact iformat today on 1300 88 64 50, or fill in the form to get in touch with us online.
You can also visit us for website for tradies in Melbourne: pop into our office at 105D Carpenter Street, Brighton 3186 VIC.
