SEO 101 for a Local Pest Control Business:
Written by Pest Control proof. Pest Control proof is a local pest control company serving Michigan and Massachusetts.
There are literally thousands of SEO articles and videos on the Internet, along with thousands of different companies trying to sell you their SEO services. As a result, it’s easy for a local pest control company to get overwhelmed by SEO and not know where to start.
This post will give you an overview about what an effective SEO campaign for a local pest control business should do and how it should do it. It will also provide a good foundation for you, whether you’re looking to hire out your SEO or tackle it in-house.
The 3 Ways People Search for Pest Control
There are 3 main ways that people look for pest control on search engines like Google:
General searches: “pest control”, “exterminator,” etc.
Specific pest searches: “wasps in house”, “flying ants”, “get rid of mice in house,” etc.
Location searches: “pest control seattle wa”, “dallas tx exterminator,” etc.
In general, the easiest type of search for a local pest control business to show up for is location searches. However, there is a significant amount of additional search volume available with general and specific pest searches that don’t include a location qualifier like a city name or a state abbreviation, so an effective SEO campaign will target all 3 types of searches.
Search engines will push your site up higher in the rankings when people search for general or specific pest searches in your area, which will allow you to compete with and even beat the large national sites for searches performed in your area.
What Makes an Effective SEO Campaign
The job of an effective SEO campaign is to establish 2 things to search engines about your site:
Relevance, i.e. what searches should your site show up for
Authority, i.e. what position should your site be in
Relevance
Relevance is initially established by the content on your site. Ideally, your content will show Google that your site is a relevant result for all 3 different kinds of pest searches. This means your content should include general pest control information, information about specific pests and the treatments for them you provide, and information about the different areas you service.
Authority
Authority is established by what other sites have to say about your site. Ideally, there will be a steady pattern of new (hopefully positive) links, reviews and mentions of your site on other high quality websites. The more websites that mention your site in some way, and the more Google respects the other sites you get mentioned on, the greater the authority your site will receive.
How to Establish Your Website’s Relevance
To establish relevance for all 3 kinds of pest control searches, you’ll want to include the following types of content on your site:
Your Business Information
1. Things to include:
Your business name, address and phone number
Selling points for your business, i.e. why someone should choose your business over your competitors
2. Where to include them:
“NAP” (name, address and phone number): should be included in the footer of all your website’s pages.
Homepage: should include the main selling points for your business and why visitors should choose you.
About Us page: this is a great place to expand more on your history, corporate values, mission, etc.
Contact Us page: this is a great place to include any more contact methods, such as email, webforms, online chat, etc.
Reviews page: if your site has the ability for visitors/customers to leave reviews on it, then a Reviews page is a great place to include recent reviews you’ve received.
Major Services You Offer
1. Things to include:
Major pests you treat and how you treat them
Service types (i.e. one-time services, monthly or quarterly services, etc.)
2. Where to include them:
Homepage: should describe your services in general without going into as much detail as internal pages. This is the page you want to rank for general searches like “pest control” or “exterminator” so those are the kinds of topics to discuss on the homepage.
Pest pages: each major pest type that you service should have its own page where you explain that pest’s behavior and how you treat them.
Service page(s): Most pest control companies offer several different types of services, with the preferred one from the company’s standpoint being a quarterly agreement for 1 or more years. It is a good idea to include pages on your site about your service types. You could create one page describing all your main service types, or you could create a page for each service type.
Major Service Areas
1. Things to include:
Where you offer services
2. Where to include them:
Homepage: this is where you want to talk about your primary service area. For example, if you service the Dallas, TX metro area you would include content about Dallas on your homepage so it could rank for location searches like “pest control dallas”.
Service area pages: it is a good idea to include a separate page on your site for each city or town in your service area. This will allow you to talk more about your particular services, customers or common pests in each city or town. These are the pages you want to rank for location searches about specific local cities or towns.
How to Establish Your Website’s Authority
1. Work on getting high quality, relevant websites to link to your website.
Links from other websites have historically been the biggest SEO factor, so getting links to your site is critical for it to succeed in SEO.
Things to know when building links:
Go for quality over quantity. A quality link is one that is related to your site (same industry, same service area, etc.). Several links per month is a good link acquisition rate for a site in a normally-competitive service area.
Don’t go overboard with keywords in your link text. The majority of links pointing to your site should have your business name or website URL in the clickable link text. In the past search engines liked when you used SEO keywords instead of your brand name to link to your site, but they will penalize you for it now.
Build links to your important SEO internal pages in addition to your homepage. Links are the “power” or “fuel” that allow your pages to rank, so it’s a good idea to build at least several links over time to all pages on your site that you want to rank.
Good places to start building links:
Industry organizations
Regional associations
Business partners
2. Work on consistently getting positive reviews on the major third party platforms
Search engines use reviews on third party sites to help determine your site’s rankings in both map listings and regular search engine listings. Search engines look at the total number of reviews you have on each major platform, your aggregate review score, the speed at which you are earning reviews and the freshness of your reviews (newer are better).
It’s important to have a moderate number of reviews, but beyond that the value of them for SEO diminishes quickly, i.e. 20 total reviews is much better than 0, but 500 reviews is only a little bit better than 20.
The major review platforms for a local pest control business are:
Yelp
Home Advisor
Angies List
BBB
3. Work on getting your site listed on the major citation platforms, with consistent listing information.
Citations are listings of your business on “telephone directory” sites like the Yellow Pages or Dex Knows.
It’s a good idea to have at least 10 or 15 of these listings since search engines use them to confirm you are who you say you are.
The most important factor with citations is consistency of your listing information.
There are many inexpensive services you can use who will submit your site to the major citation platforms.
For more information check out Pest Control Proof.
