Summertime is the time for playing outside, enjoying days by the water, and soaking up the sun. Thanks to the heat of the season, it’s also your HVAC company’s busiest time of the year.
Air conditioning units are a saving grace for homeowners, property managers, or facility operators from the start of spring to the middle of fall (and sometimes beyond that, depending on where in the country you’re located). When one goes out, the folks inside start to sweat from the heat and the stress until a team like yours shows up to save the day with your repair or replacement solutions.
So, how can you increase your chances of your number being the one people call to get their A/C unit back in working order or to receive a new unit when their old one breaks for good?
You have to have a successful website.
The quality of your website matters, especially at a time like this when people in your service areas need you the most. Just a quick search on Google for “AC repair near me” can result in the user calling your number or calling your competition, depending on whether you show up in the search or not.
In order to boost your presence on search engines and serve even more customers throughout the summer and all year long, let’s look at some of the most success-driving moves you can make regarding your website:
Perform an SEO Audit of Your Website
Auditing your website is a valuable, results-driven action you can take to see where your HVAC site’s SEO stands on a technical level and how well it serves visitors who land on your site.
When you undergo an audit of your website, you can uncover numerous errors, problem points, and areas to improve so that both users and search engine crawlers interact with your website in more positive ways.
What Does an SEO Audit Evaluate?
A quality SEO audit examines how well your content serves users and how effective your website’s technical aspects are at the time of the audit.
Because SEO involves the strategies, techniques, and processes applied to a website to help it reach the top of search engine results pages (SERPs) in relevant searches, it’s vital to monitor these strategies and techniques periodically to ensure they are actually working.
What Search Engines Rely on When Ranking Your Site
- Quality of your content – is your content robust? Is it well-written? Relevant to a search? Concise and clear?
- Navigation – Is your website easy to navigate? Are there clear links from the homepage to the rest of the site? Do your links work? Is your menu functional?
- Page speed – Do your pages load quickly, or does it take several seconds for content to appear?
- Mobile-friendliness – Is your website designed for mobile use? Is your web design responsive, meaning it fits the device used to access it?
- Site security – Is your site protected from cybercriminals or hackers? Is important data secure and not vulnerable to exploitation?
- Authority and trust – Has your website proven to serve users and other websites well in the past? Is the information presented as up-to-date and accurate as it should be so users can trust the content they encounter when they visit?
An audit can help you evaluate each of these factors to pinpoint improvement opportunities and strengthen your SEO strategies further.
Just a few of the things an audit can uncover include:
- Good or bad keyword usage
- Broken links
- Pages with 404 status codes (and others)
- Structured data issues
- Improper metadata usage
- Duplicate pages or duplicated content
- Issues that lead to slow page load speeds
And hundreds more.
Update Your Website With SEO-Focused Changes
It would be more than silly to undergo an SEO audit of your website and not implement the changes suggested by the evaluation—it would be downright pointless.
When you uncover issues that are keeping your website from ranking higher on the SERPs, it’s crucial to apply the changes necessary to address those issues and start appearing in more searches for things like “AC repair near me,” “New AC installation,” ” Air conditioning repair company near me,” and all the others that will lead users to your website and eventually lead you to their front door.
Some of the SEO improvements your audit could indicate may include:
Adding More Keywords to Your Content
Keywords are essential to determining where you will rank on the SERPs during a relevant search. The closer your content matches the keyword phrase used for the search, the more likely you are to appear on page one.
But how can you know what people are searching to find you? You know through keyword research. Keyword research reveals the most common words, phrases, and questions people use on Google or Bing to try and find a company like yours for AC service.
Once you have a list of the most effective keywords, you can incorporate them into your web content strategically to help boost your site’s performance.
Fixing the Navigation of Your Website
Broken links, 404 pages, redirects, and generally poor navigation throughout your website are enough to turn a user away and displease the web crawlers. The better your navigation is, the better your user experience (UX) will be for visitors, and the better your SEO performance will be with the crawlers.
When it comes to navigation, everything needs to work, and it needs to be simple. Site navigation is most effective when it is:
- Simple
- Clear
- Easy to follow
- Designed for mobile
- Consistent
- Working properly
And more.
Adding or Correcting Structured Data and Schema Markup
Structured data is information on the back end of your website that Google and other search engine crawlers use to understand your website and present your company in relevant searches. It’s organized into sets of data marked with tags that help web crawlers easily identify specific details and better understand your content and company.
In essence, visitors rely on the design and content to understand your site; the crawlers rely on structured data and schema markup.
If your structured data or schema markups are incorrect or even missing, you’re not communicating with the crawlers correctly and are missing opportunities to appear in the right searches.
If you know web coding and the vocabularies, syntaxes, and languages necessary to structure and tag your data with schema markups, then you might be able to handle this task yourself. If you need help, you can rely on a trusted team of web developers to take care of this one for you.
There are plenty of other updates your audit could show that you need to improve your HVAC’s website performance. If it does, some things may be easy to correct on your own, while other things could require some professional assistance from a skilled team of web experts. If that’s the case, M&R is ready and available to help you out!
Add a Blog That Features Relevant, Authoritative Content
It’s not good for your website’s content to go stale, become out of date, or be inaccurate. Users don’t like to feel misled, and search engine crawlers don’t like to present information in search results that isn’t beneficial to users.
One way to keep your site updated with fresh, relevant content is through a well-maintained blog.
Blog articles that are SEO-focused, written well, and contain valuable information are effective for maintaining a successful site in several ways:
- Blog articles provide more content for Google and other search engines to use in relevant searches. The more content you have, the better your chances are of showing up in front of the right user and driving traffic to your website.
- Blog articles serve visitors valuable information that they can read, revisit, and rely on whenever they need the info you’ve provided.
- Blog articles establish you as a voice of authority in your industry. When you present accurate content about a topic, you help answer people’s questions and elevate yourself as an industry leader or voice of authority among your readers.
Your HVAC Website’s Success Can Push Business Even Further This Summer and Well Into Next Year. For the Most Effective Strategies for Your Website, Talk to the Team at M&R Marketing: 478-621-4491
Our in-house team of copywriters, web designers, and web developers all understand what it takes to create a successful website for your company. Whether you need a new website, a web redesign, an SEO audit and site update, blog management, or anything else regarding the success of your site, our team has what it takes to reach your audience on the search engines and drive your business forward.
Contact one of our business development managers today to discover how our strategies can boost your website’s performance.
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