When you need help with pests, the last thing you want to do is spend hours online trying to find the right company. You need help now, and you need it fast.
That's why SEO for pest control companies is so important.
By ranking high in Google, you can get in front of customers who are desperately looking for help right now. And since most people turn to Google when they need help with a problem, this is the best way to reach new customers quickly and easily.
In this article, we'll show you to do SEO on your website and how you can get in front of these customers online.
What is Pest Control SEO?
Pest Control SEO is the process of optimizing your website so that it ranks high in Google, Bing, Yahoo and other search engines.
This includes optimizing your website content, structure and other on-page elements as well.
Off-Page optimization is equally important, so building backlinks is crucial in any Pest Control SEO campaign.
Why is SEO for Pest Control Companies Important?
There are many reasons why SEO is important for pest control companies.
The first reason is there are no better ways of getting in front of your customers than SEO.
When you rank #1 for searches like "Pest Control Near Me" or "Rat Exterminator Near Me", it means that the people searching these phrases will see your website before any other company's site.
These people are looking for help now, and SEO is the best way to reach them fast. This gives you targeted traffic, with a higher conversion rate.
Brand awareness is another SEO benefit for pest control companies.
When you SEO your site, people come to it naturally.
This means that SEO creates brand awareness for your company, establishing you as an authority in the pest control industry.
Unlike Paid Ads, SEO doesn't stop working when your campaign ends. It is an investment that will bring you, new customers, for years to come.
Content Marketing for Pest Control Companies
Content marketing is all about creating content that is valuable to your audience.
This could be an article on how to get rid of ants naturally, or it can be a video tutorial on how to remove wasps from the roof of your house.
Most pest control companies don't utilize content marketing, which creates an opportunity for your brand to get ahead.
All of these can be posted to the blog section of your website. This blog should be a place where you share valuable information and where you answer any questions that your customers might have.
This does not only create topical relevance for your website in Google, but it helps you create a connection with your customers.
You can also use a software like Surfer SEO to create optimized content, which aligns with your content plan.
Do You Want More Customers?
If you are looking to generate more customers, check out this guide and learn how.
You'll find 5 steps that will help fix the most important things on your website today!
Creating Topical Relevance on Your Pest Control Website
Topical relevance has been a real buzzword recently in the pest control SEO industry and we don't see it going away any time soon.
What this means is that your website needs to be relevant to the topics that people are searching for. In the pest control services industry, this could mean creating blog posts about getting rid of cockroaches, spiders or rats.
The easiest way of doing this is by writing blog articles targeting long-tail keywords. This makes sure that you will be able to rank and bring in organic traffic and at the same time create relevance.
You need to create relevance on the local level as well. This means you need to write blog posts about the locations you operate in, like "Ohio's Most Prevalent Pests".
You can easily find these keywords by doing keyword research.
Pest Control SEO Keyword Research
Finding the right keywords to target is essential in any Search Engine Optimization campaign, and pest control is no different.
If you target the wrong keywords, you most likely won't get any leads. You might receive organic traffic, but no leads.
If you target high competition keywords, you might be targeting the right ones, but you'll have to invest a lot of money in order to rank.
The best is to go for local keywords that you know you can rank for, plus long-tail informational keywords.
We will show you how you can find these keywords.
Step 1: Choosing a Tool
The first step is choosing a keyword research tool. There are a number of them available and it comes down to your personal preference and budget.
If you don't have a lot to invest in SEO for your Pest Control Business, we recommend starting with a free keyword research tool like Google Keyword Planner. This tool gives you some data and if you have an active Google Ads account, you can get even more data.
If you have a little more to invest, we recommend using Ahrefs which is a paid tool. It offers much more data than the Keyword Planner and also includes a keyword research feature that can help you find keywords related to your business.
Step 2: Writing Up Your Local Areas
Next, you need to write up what Local Areas you service.
We recommend starting from the state level and going down to the city level. If you want to be granular, you can also target specific neighborhoods.
For example, if you service the entire state of Ohio, you would first target "Ohio pest control" then move to smaller cities in Ohio, like "Cincinnati pest control" and "Columbus pest control".
The more granular you get, the easier it will be to rank for those specific keywords.
Step 3: Finding Informational Keywords
The last step is finding informational keywords. These are keywords that people are searching for when they want information about pests, but they're not ready to hire a pest control company yet.
For example, a person might search for "how to get rid of cockroaches" or "spider control tips".
These are the types of keywords you want to target because they have a lower competition level and although people who are searching for them are usually not ready to hire a pest control company, but might be in the future.
Targeting these keywords will help you bring in organic traffic and build up your topical relevance.
Make sure you also have a CTA on your blogs leading to a guide or a free ebook to get people on your email list.
Technical SEO
Your website needs to be optimized in order for your Pest Control SEO campaign to work.
If your website is slow, has technical issues, doesn't load correctly or the search engine crawlers can't crawl it properly, you won't rank well.
Most local terms can be ranked for in the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages) with a mediocre website, but if you want to rank for pest control keywords where the competition is higher (where usually the more money is), you'll need a technically sound website.
Importance of Website Speed
One of the most important technical SEO signals is Website Speed.
According to studies, most people don't wait more than 3 seconds for a website to load before leaving.
This means if your website loads slow, your customers will leave your website and hire your competitor instead, even if your content is great and your website is pretty.
Website Speed also affects how efficiently and fast can Google crawl and index your website. If your website is slow, Google will not crawl and index it as much as a website with good website speed.
When it comes to website performance on Pest Control sites, the most frequent problems are:
- Using a Cheap Server
- Un-optimized Images and Files
- Loading of unnecessary CSS & JS files
- Improper Caching
- Embedding Third-Party Scripts (YouTube, Chat Bots, etc.)
There are several tools (GTMetrix, Pingdom) you can use to test your website speed and see where you need to make improvements.
Google also offers a tool called Page Speed Insights, which gives you actionable advice on how to make your website faster.
Having a Good Core Quality
To show up for the keywords on the top of Google, your website needs to have a Good Core Quality. We use the term "Core Quality" to measure the general and On Page SEO optimization of a website.
Having a solid "core quality" means your website meets all of the major audit standards, such as:
- No Meta Title / Description Issues
- No Heading (H1,H2, etc.) Issues
- No Thin or Low Quality Content
- No Technical SEO issues
- No Duplicate Content
- No Redirect Issues
Some of these issues may appear to be minor, but the more you get, the more they weigh down your site's position in search engines like Google and Bing.
Website Crawlability
For Google to understand your website, it first has to crawl it.
How well Google can crawl your website affects how well you rank.
There are a few things you can do to make sure your website is crawlable:
Use Internal Links
Your Pest Control website needs a lot of internal links. This will help Google crawl and index your website better.
You can link relevant blog posts together internally, by pointing a link from one to the other and you can also internal link blog posts with service pages. The whole meaning of these blog articles would be to power up your main service pages.
This helps Google and your users to navigate easier on your website.
Fast Load Speed
As we mentioned earlier, website speed is a very important SEO factor.
Make sure your website loads as quickly as possible so the crawlers can crawl your pages more efficiently.
Have a Good Site Architecture
Having a clear, logical website structure is one of the most important aspects of SEO. Any Pest Control SEO strategy should start with building this out.
Your local and service pages should be built out logically. Having a good structure does not help with user navigation, but it helps Google to understand your website and business as well.
The structure should be over-done either. This means pages shouldn't be buried deep in the website as it makes the crawling harder.
This is a good example of an acceptable page depth:
jamesandjames.com/pest-control/ohio/
This is an example of a bad site structure:
jamesandjames.com/category/pest-control/sub-service/example/ohio/
Optimized Robots.txt file
The Robots.txt of your website tells Google and other search engines what they are allowed to crawl on your website.
You can block certain pages, directories in your Robots.txt to help with Crawl Budget.
Structured Data (Schema)
Schema or Structured Data is a way to "label" your content so that search engines can understand it better.
By adding structured data on your pages, you can give a lot of data points about you and your content to Google, without it actually having to read the content.
It also helps Google to connect the dots about you and your business, giving you more trust.
The most important schema types for pest control companies are: Person, Organization, Local Business and Service.
Link Building
Link Building or Off-Page SEO is the process of acquiring links from other websites to your website.
The more high-quality links you have, the better your website will rank.
There are several ways you can get links, but the most common ones are guest blogging, link exchanges and directory submissions.
A good way of link building is creating linkable assets. This can mean creating a statistic article that is interesting for other sites to link to, like blogs or news websites, or an interactive tool like a calculator.
Local SEO For Pest Control Companies
As a pest control company, you are most likely will get most of your leads from people in your local area who are looking for a local pest control company.
This is where a Local SEO Campaign comes into play.
Local SEO is the process of optimizing your website and online presence for people in your local area.
If you have a Google My Business you can appear in the local map pack and in Google Maps for keywords like "pest control company in New York".
There are several things you will need to do to rank your pest control company in your area.
Some of them are:
Local Citations
Citations are mentions of your business Name, Address, Phone (NAP) on other websites.
There are a lot of websites where local businesses can add their NAP, like Yellow pages, Yelp.
The more citations you have, the more Google will trust your website and business.
Make sure you have your NAP correct and consistent on all citations.
Reviews
Online Reviews are a very important part of Local SEO.
Make sure you encourage your customers to leave reviews on Google, Yelp, Facebook and any other local review site.
You can also offer incentives like discounts or free services for leaving a review.
The more positive reviews you have the better! Take a look at your competitor's Google My Business and see how many they have and try to shoot for that number.
How to Structure Your Pest Control Business Website?
When it comes to local SEO for pest control, website structure is one of the most important factors.
For each location you target on your Google My Business, you should have a page on your website as well.
Structurally, it should look something like this:
jamesandjames.com/pest-control/ohio/
You should have a service page for pest control and under it, a page that is targeting Ohio.
All of these pages should have the structured data that we have mentioned above.
Tracking SEO Results for Pest Control Businesses
One of the most important aspects of SEO is tracking your results. This way you can see what is working and what isn't.
There are a few different ways you can track your SEO results:
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a free tool from Google that gives you insights into your website traffic.
You can see where your traffic is coming from, what pages are being visited and how long people are staying on your site.
This can help you to see what SEO tactics are working and which ones you should stop.
Google Search Console
Google Search Console is another free tool from Google that gives you insights into your website's search traffic.
You can see what keywords people are using to find your site, how many impressions your site is getting and how many clicks you are getting.
This tool also gives clues about the health of your website, if it has any errors or warnings that you need to address.
Keyword Tracking Tools
You need to track what keywords you are ranking for, how many impressions you are getting and how many clicks you are getting.
To gauge how well your SEO efforts are working, you need to track what keywords you are ranking for. There are a lot of paid tools that can do this easily for you, our recommendation is SerpRobot which has the best price for value.
There are also tools that can show you how well you rank in your service area.
Tracking Leads
The most important is to track how many leads you are getting from SEO.
You can track this in several ways, but the most common way is to track how many form submits you are getting on your website.
You can easily do this with Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager.
You can also use a CRM like SalesForce to track how many leads you are getting from SEO. It's one of the main metrics to track to measure the success with a pest control seo agency.
