How home-services businesses can win steady work from Google without living on ads and referrals.
If you're reading this, you probably run a home-services company and you're wondering how to grow it sustainably, without spending thousands on Google Ads every month or relying on referrals.
We speak to a lot of home-services businesses, from plumbers to electricians to renovators. Some tell us they rely completely on referrals. Others say work trickles in through Google Ads and Meta Ads. These channels definitely work.
But every business owner knows referrals are volatile. One month they're great, the next not so much. Google and Meta Ads are similar. They work well one month and poorly the next, and you're stuck on a constant paid media treadmill.
We've found that over long stretches of time, SEO is a viable alternative for a home-services business. It's there for the long term. You're not paying for every click. And it's predictable. 1,000 visits a month can become 25 enquiries and 10 jobs.
In this blog, we'll cover what we've learnt from working with home-services businesses, from why home-services SEO works through to local, off-page, on-page and technical SEO.
When you have an issue with your home, or want to improve it, the data shows Google is where you turn. 98% of consumers use the internet to find local home-services businesses, and 87% of those use Google in the process.
When you search for "renovators", the results page has three sections.
SEO for home services is a little different to other niches like SaaS and ecommerce. You have to fight for both the normal organic rankings and the local rankings on Google Maps.
This applies to both types of home-services work, emergency jobs and planned projects.
Emergency searches have high urgency and a very short conversion window. Think an emergency plumber for a burst pipe, an electrician after a power outage or a locksmith for a lockout. People call the first trusted provider they see.
Planned projects are researched. These include bathroom and kitchen renovations, solar panel installation and landscaping.
Either way, the work has two parts. The first is local SEO, which covers your Google Business Profile and trust signals. The second is traditional SEO, which covers backlinks, content marketing, and service and location pages.
Local SEO makes your business appear when people nearby search for the service you provide. Traditional SEO chases national or industry rankings. Local SEO optimises for location-based queries and map visibility.
It's critical for home-services businesses because Google is where people turn when something at home needs fixing, and the intent behind those searches is strong. A Google study from 2016 found 76% of people who do a local search on their smartphone visit a related business within 24 hours, and about 28% of those searches lead to a purchase.
Google shows the map pack because reviews drive the decision. 81% of people read reviews, and many check two or three review sites before choosing. Every provider claims to offer the same service and the same end result, so reviews are the best proxy for quality.
Here are a few tips for ranking in local search.
For traditional SEO, home-services businesses can use off-page SEO. It increases the authority of your website, which improves your rankings and brings in more leads.
A lot of home-services companies optimise their website for local SEO, but off-page is often overlooked. From our work, it comes down to four things. These are passive link-building, links from local news and community sites, directories and citations, and partnerships.
Create genuinely useful, locally relevant resources that keep providing value to people visiting your site. These include evergreen tools and authority resources people can always come back to.
Evergreen tools include cost calculators, coverage calculators, look-up tools, maintenance planners and emergency flowcharts. For instance, you could build a roof repair cost per m² calculator that real-estate blogs can embed. Or you could publish a printable "Is this an emergency?" decision tree that other sites can use to inform local residents.
Authority resources are high-quality pieces of content that stay relevant over time, so they become the default reference on a topic. For instance, an explainer on what the council covers versus what the homeowner covers, with links to the council pages.
Once you've published these resources, reach out to local news and community sites and ask them to reference your post. You could publish data stories like "Top 5 leak causes in the Inner West", or an apprentice program that community sites can link to.
Good targets include council newsletters, school and club newsletters, chambers of commerce, local radio and community blogs.
List your business with the directories and marketplaces people use to find trusted providers in your area. These include Yellow Pages, Localsearch, Hotfrog, hipages and Airtasker.
You can also join more prestigious bodies like your local Chamber of Commerce, and industry-specific ones like Master Plumbers or Master Electricians Australia.
Finally, a low-lift play is to set up a Facebook Page, Instagram, YouTube and Nextdoor.
Find local suppliers, manufacturers, property managers, builders and real estate agents. Set up a "Preferred Partners" page swap and ask them to recommend you as well.
There are two elements to on-page SEO, keyword optimisation and structural optimisation.
This is the foundation of on-page SEO. There are approximately 1.57 million home-service searches per year across the top 15 trades in Australia. That equates to about 4,300 per day. Within this, there are around 1,700 electrician searches and 450 carpenter searches per day.
You capture this demand by writing content that answers those queries with useful, detailed information.
Here is some content worth writing.
This covers the structural aspects of each page, so Google can crawl and index the site correctly.
On-page SEO optimises a single page for search queries. Technical SEO optimises your website infrastructure sitewide. It lets Google index your site and gives your prospect a good experience.
Here are some tips.
Grab a free 30-minute call with Tommy or Paddy. We'll look at where you rank now, and what it'd take to own your market.
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