Improve Your Pest Control Company Website for SEO

Improving your pest control company website for SEO can be a really simple and effective use of time. There are a number of simple “missed opportunities” when it comes to aligning your pest control company website to how Users on Google, Yahoo!, DuckDuckGo, and other popular search engines may find you.

Key Takeaways

• Basic missed opportunities like making sure your H1 includes your local city, neighborhood, or state—is an easy optimization to correct and can increase the odds of someone finding your website on search engines by more than 30%.
• Remembering to do basic tasks like submitting your sitemap to Google through Google webmaster tools, ensuring that you don’t have any “no-index” tags on your website, and making sure that you optimize your meta description to include pest control services keywords and local geographies are some other great ways to optimize your pest control company for SEO.

Top 8 Ways to Optimize Your Pest Control Website for SEO

Here are some of the top ways to optimize your pest control website for SEO:

1. Include your local geography in the H1

Most commonly, it’s easy to forget to include your service area in the H1. For most people, they simply want to say, “Pest Control Services” because that feels the most targeted. However, Google wants to help local customers connect with your website. And to help optimize your website for best results in the SERPs, it’s useful to give Google’s crawlers a boost.

Here’s some H1’s that you might already have on your pest control website:

1. Pest Control Services
2. Local Pest Control
3. Pest Control
4. Pest, Insect, and Rodent Control

While those are great, consider some of these elegant alternatives:

1. Pest Control Services in Columbus, OH
2. Pest Control in Columbus
3. Pest, Insect, And Rodent Control in Columbus

The inclusion of the primary geography that you service can be helpful in Google’s crawlers contextualizing where you offer your pest control services.

Here’s a great example of an optimized H1 for SEO by Broadway Pest Control in New York, NY.

2. Include your local geography in your meta title

Very similar to the tip above, including your local geography in the meta title of your website can be another helpful indicator for Google’s crawlers to contextualize the services that you offer. And where you offer them.

Page titles might look like the following:

1. Chip’s Pest Control Services
2. Done & Done Pest Control
3. Pest Control by John

Instead, think of something like the following:

1. Chip’s Pest Control Services | Columbus, OH
2. Done & Done Pest Control in Columbus, OH

These simple adjustments can go a long way in helping Google match a prospective customer or caller with your pest control website.

Related: Complete pest control SEO guide

3. Don’t forget about your meta description

Often, most meta descriptions are generated by whatever content management system you use. However, it’s best to optimize your meta description to both include your local service areas as well as ensure it’s a clean, well-written, and “clicky” description. While Google might not take your meta description verbatim and show it to Users on the search results page, it’s still a helpful signal especially when combined with your H1, meta title, and now meta description update.

Here’s an example of a helpful meta description that stays under 150 characters:

Call us today for same-day pest control services in Columbus, OH. With 1,000 reviews and a 5-star rating, you can trust in Chip’s Pest Control.

This simple meta description is only 143 characters in length and calls out the number of reviews and overall rating for the business. Making highly “clicky” to the User who might see it in the SERPs.

4. Optimize your website for pest control keywords

It can be useful to consider what keywords prospective customers put into Google and other search engines to find you. Here’s a short list of potential keywords that someone might use:

Using this list you can see variations like “affordable” and “cheap,” which could make for a great way to include these word variations in paragraph text throughout your website. Or, potentially adding entire sections of your pest control website that speak to coupons, special promotions, or other offerings for new customers.

It’s most common to see pest control companies want to appear for “near me” search terms. However, if you follow some of the optimizations above, you’re already well on your way to increasing the odds of appearing for those searching “pest control services” on their mobile device (automatically geolocates them and localizes the search).

Related: 100 pest control keywords for SEO

5. Create a very helpful website

While the optimizations above will take you less than 30-minutes to complete, it’s also worth spending time thinking about how well your website is designed to take a visitor and convert them into a caller. Most frequently, pest control companies want to get lead calls that either go directly to the owner or a service agent.

It’s useful to include helpful video, imagery, and links to ratings and reviews so that customers who land on your website are compelled to make a call. Remember, all of your customers are going through a “diligence” phase when they first land on your pest control website.

They most likely want to know the answer to a few questions:

1. Can this pest control company fix the particular issue I’m dealing with?
2. How much does it cost to work with this pest control company?
3. Is this pest control company trustworthy? Do local customers use them and appreciate working with them?
4. What is the phone number to call them and get services?

Broadway Exterminating does a great job of making sure they speak to trust for website visitors. Leaning into the number of years they’ve been in business, real pictures of real employees, and providing a promise to customers for all services rendered.

We can see the presence of the local service area’s once more. However, not “over doing” it. To where the website loses its ability to answer the diligence questions a prospective customer has.

6. Have a mobile-friendly website

This is often overlooked as well. Google’s crawlers will start from a mobile-first perspective. And do render websites into actual HTML. If they see issues with your mobile rendering, they’ll not necessarily prevent it from appearing in search results, however, they might not prefer the page as highly as others.

You can use Google Chrome’s inspector option to render your website in mobile devices and see how it looks. Try to resolve any overflow issues or issues where the User might have a more difficult time navigating through the website or making a phone call to you (your primary call-to-action).

To check this in Google Chrome do the following:

1. Right click on the body of the website.
2. Click “Inspect” from the drop down list
3. Toward the top of the page,  choose “Dimensions” and select your device

7. Submit your sitemap to Google

Google utilizes sitemaps to know which pages to crawl and in what order. Without submitting a sitemap to Google, you’re going to be relying on their crawlers to naturally find your website through the external links that point to it as well as your internal links that go deeper into your website.

By simply claiming your website through Google Webmaster Tools and then submitting a sitemap, you increase your odds of the pest control company website getting put into Google’s index. And once it’s in the index, you have a far greater chance that all of your optimizations above get noticed.

8. Don’t over optimize your website for SEO

This is my last and best tip—don’t try to “over do” pest control SEO. Instead, try to aim for making a very helpful website that speaks to all of the pest control services that you offer. Create individual pages for all of the rodent, insect, and pests that you deal with. And create individual service area pages that align with the nearby cities that you’re willing to go to.

By creating a naturally helpful website, you’re doing more modern pest control SEO. Try to avoid keyword stuffing your service areas into every single paragraph. Remember, if a customer does land on your website, you want it to be professional, elegant, and worthy of them making a phone call. An over-optimized website might not “look real” or may “look fishy” to the customer who lands on the page.

Keep the prospective caller, their questions, and what you offer in mind. Avoid extremely long websites with unnecessary website text. However, don’t go too short to where you don’t describe and explain everything that you offer in detail. Keep it balance, informative, and focused on good User Experience.

Pro tip: Go through a small A/B test by asking friends and family to view the website. Ask them questions like, “Do you know what services we offer?” Or, “Were you able to find the page that spoke to our ant prevention services?” Questions like this can be useful in grading the balance you have around SEO and overall quality of User Experience.