According to public data found on IBISWorld, “There are 3,776,498 Construction businesses in the US as of 2023, an increase of 2.4% from 2022.” That’s quite a bit of competition. Deploying a search engine marketing strategy (for both organic and paid) can certainly help a construction business to stand out from competitors and get more visibility around its offerings.

Key Takeaways

• Construction company SEO is the act of improving a website’s performance and relevancy for keywords and questions Users put into Google to be more visible in SERPs (search engine results pages).
• Newer concepts around construction company SEO include building out topical authority maps and creating a number of highly-targeted service pages and location pages to assist clients in finding you through Google.
• Local SEO tactics include optimizing Google Business listings for relevancy utilizing reviews, custom photography, and keywords to appear in “Business” packs when “near me” searches occur.

High-level SEO Strategy for Construction Companies

At a high level, to perform SEO for construction companies we’re going to want to take a look at a few different aspects of our overarching strategy. They can be broken down into:

1. Our construction companies website being optimized for SEO

It’s often easy to overlook small components of a website that could prevent it from appearing in search engines correctly. Optimizing a website for SEO is simply helping Google’s engines better comprehend what a webpage is about. And who the webpage is for.

For example, let’s say we have an H1 on the homepage it says something like the following:

H1 – A Construction Company You Can Trust

While that’s a great start to describing who you are, a wonderful construction company that your customers can trust. When it comes to Google’s crawlers, they’re going to have a more difficult time comprehending who to serve your page to.

We can adjust that H1 to something like this:

H1 – Trusted Construction Services in Chicago, IL

That H1 now contains our target local market and more insights on what we offer to our customers.

Use this as a general example of what constitutes optimizing a construction company website for SEO. We’ll get more into optimization techniques further in this guide.

2. Knowing which target audience and keywords we want to optimize for

The good news is that if you’re the owner of a construction company, there’s a good chance that you already know who your target customers are. And what they’re looking for. However, it’s important to reverse-engineer how your target customers are trying to discover you.

For example, if we’re a local construction company providing residential home building services, what a User might put into Google to discover us is going to vary compared to if we offer commercial construction services.

Keywords for Residential Home Builders and Construction Companies

Here are some keywords that a local residential home builder might want to target:

1. Residential home builders near me
2. Residential home builders in [target geography] (Ex: Residential home builders in Chicago, IL)
3. Custom home builders near me
4. Residential construction near me
5. Residential construction in [target geography] (Ex: Residential construction in Chicago, IL)

Keywords for Commercial Construction Companies

Here are some keywords that a local commercial construction company might want to target:

1. Commercial construction companies near me
2. Large commercial construction companies near me
3. Small commercial construction companies near me
4. Commercial construction companies in [target geography] (Ex: Commercial construction companies in Chicago, IL)
5. General contractors near me

We’ll get more into your keywords and how we target them with particular strategies further into this guide. However, a general idea of the different types of ways that clients may find you are a helpful level-set in what we’re trying to accomplish with our construction company SEO campaign.

For the sake of this guide, we’re going to discuss more of the commercial construction business strategy with SEO. However, if you’re a residential home builder or general contractor, your approach will be somewhat similar.

3. Using the right construction company SEO strategies to help clients discover us

When most people think of “SEO,” they think of blog posts. However, that’s not always the best way to get in front of prospective clients. Often, customers who are looking for you won’t just be looking for the keywords above. They’ll be looking for something very specific to their need. Usually, this is a client who already has some knowledge about construction.

For example, a construction company that’s doing SEO quite well is APX Construction Group. One of the main ways that they’re getting in front of clients is by having highly targeted and helpful service pages.

This pre-construction planning service page ends up being very useful when a client puts into Google, “pre-construction planning mankato mn.” While tools like Ahrefs or SEMrush might tell us that the keywords don’t have any monthly search volume, that doesn’t mean that we don’t receive any benefit from creating these types of service pages.

In short, we need to map out what types of pages we need to create to show Google that we’re experts and authoritative figures in the space that we service. In short, E-E-A-T is defined as, “a framework that Google’s machines use to evaluate the quality of content and websites. It stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. Google’s human reviewers, known as Quality Raters, use E-E-A-T to assess content quality and provide feedback on search results pages (SERPs). While E-E-A-T signals aren’t ranking factors, they can turn into directly impacting rankings.”

More on this as we continue…

4. Ensuring our website is rendering appropriately for crawlers

I wouldn’t normally bring this up in just any SEO article. However, it’s more common to see on construction company websites—a website that’s not rendering properly for mobile devices or generally not built with quality.

If a Google crawler can’t properly render a website for mobile devices or has trouble reading the contents of a website, it’s going to prevent any optimizations that are made to our SEO strategy from working. This is more common in these types of industries (like construction) just simply due to the fact that the website is not usually a top investment for a construction company.

Doing a simple check for some of the following will be helpful:

1. Is the website mobile-friendly? Is it responsive to multiple device viewports?
2. Is there a sitemap that’s available? Is it submitted to Google via Google Search Console.
3. Can the pages get indexed by search engine crawlers? Is there anything in the source HTML code that would otherwise stop crawlers? Is there anything in the robots.txt file that would prevent crawlers?

Using a tool like Ahrefs or ScreamingFrog, you can determine if there are any core issues that might be plaguing the website from appearing in search engines.

5. Having a local SEO strategy with GMB listings

It’s impossible to discuss any local search marketing strategy without including GMB listings. Generally, these are the listings that appear when you perform any type of local or “near me” search. They’ll be under “Businesses” and usually include anywhere from 3 to 4 business listings.

Optimizing a Google Business listing for SEO usually includes some of the following:

1. Ensuring that you have a healthy amount of reviews.
2. Ensuring that you have unique custom photography.
3. Ensuring that your listing contains your target geographic location.
4. Ensuring that your listing contains part of your service types.

As an example, we can see “Commercial Construction” appear in the business name of this listing (G. Fisher Commercial Construction, Inc.). This may be a useful way to attract the right target audience that we spoke about prior. I.e., are you in commercial construction, general contracting, or residential construction?

While optimizing Google Business profiles can be a process in itself. You’ll want to make sure that you have one of thes profiles claimed and that you start driving clients to leave you reviews. If you want to create one, here’s where to start.

Top Tactics for Construction Company SEO in 2024

I’ll do my best here to bring new concepts to the table when it comes to optimizing a construction company website for SEO. You’ve probably heard about most of the basics we covered above. But what are some real ways to start bringing in leads? Let’s jump in:

1. Create as many service pages as you can

When I look at APX Construction Group, one thing I really like about their approach is that they created a number of service pages that speak to everything they offer. From agricultural construction to PEMB construction (Pre-Engineered Metal Buildings).

Think about this for a moment. If you’re working with a bank or potentially getting staffed out by an architectural firm, they’re going to know industry-specific terminology. It’s not just going to be simply, “construction companies near me.”

PEMB construction, as an example, is a very industry-specific term. And even though tools like Ahrefs may tell us that “PEMB Construction in Chicago, IL” has very little to no search volume, it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t create that service page.

Here are a few reasons why:

1. It creates EEAT signals: By creating more service pages and connecting them together through a robust internal linking strategy, we are developing topical authority for our area of expertise. For example, pre-construction planning, PEMB construction, construction project management, and more. All of these are related subject matters. Having pages for each of these, that are well designed for search, helps to establish both topical and domain authority that can be far more powerful than off-page or link-building strategies.
2. It goes beyond just SEO: If a customer finds you through SEO, however, doesn’t know what you offer (complete services list), what are the chances they’re going to contact you? It could be quite low. We want to make sure that we think holistically about our website, outside of just “doing SEO.” Meaning, creating a robust list of services that we offer to encourage prospective clients to call us, email us, or sign up for a newsletter.

Basic services that you might want to consider adding to the website would be construction management, general contracting, master planning, specialty services, and complete design-build. In addition, any specific commercial construction or residential construction services that you offer in the area.

2. Create pages for the areas that you service

When someone puts into Google, “Construction companies near me” — often, Google will automatically locate that User based on geospatial rendering. This is where Google uses the mobile device or computer to reverse engineer the IP address of the Searcher and then serve up highly relevant webpages.

This means that when you design a website or page to appear for “near me” search terms, you don’t actually create “near me” pages, you create pages around specific locations and then let Google do the rest.

For example, using APX Construction Group as our example once more:

We can see that they created pages describing the construction services they offer for every city in the surrounding area they serve.

Here are some of the pages that they created:

1. Rochester, MN
2. Mason City, MN
3. Mankato, MN
4. Fairmont, MN

By creating individual service pages we not only get the added benefit of appearing when someone in our local area looks for a construction service we offer, we also get the benefit of continuing to build out our topical map and topical authority.

3. Create vertical-specific service pages

We’ve spoken about clients finding you by searching for something highly specific like “PEMB construction.” As well as clients finding you by searching for construction services in specific and local geographies. What’s left on the list? Construction services by business type.

“Hospitality Construction Companies” as a keyword, for example, might be searched for by an architectural group that might use if they’re looking to partner with construction groups that have hospitality construction experience.

“Office Building Construction Companies” as a keyword, for example, might be searched for by another architectural group looking for construction firms that have office building experience.

When building out our service pages, we should also consider building out vertical-specific landing pages and optimizing those for SEO (H1, meta description, meta title, and the content of the page).

Here are the examples we can see from the same APX Construction Group:

1. Office and Retail Construction
2. Hospitality Construction

Take the same strategy as you would creating a service page, outlining what you offer, and reformat that to speak to your process and approach for construction with certain verticals. Include relevant projects, white papers, or video interviews and testimonials from customers or other partnered firms.

4. Create a robust internal linking strategy

Internal linking is one of the most forgotten-about on-page SEO tactics. Used correctly, in combination with topical authority, can be far more effective than any off-page SEO strategy for construction companies.

Once you’ve created all of your service and location pages, it’s important to determine a clear and effective internal linking strategy. Our favorite is to consider a dropdown menu in the top navigation bar that includes groups like, “Services” and “Service Areas”.

This simple approach can create highly relevant relationships across pages, giving Google’s rank engines a better understanding of how to process your expertise and authoritativeness (think of this as displaying to Google that you’re highly focused on one subject and that you have a complete and comprehensive understanding of that subject).

Construction Company SEO is About Generating Leads

Let’s not forget that SEO as an acquisition channel should be measured the same way that all other marketing acquisition channels get used, by determining ROAS. The only way to get that is by measuring the effectiveness of generating calls or lead form fills.

When optimizing our construction company website for SEO using the tactics and strategies outlined above, it’s important not to forget a few things:

1. Make sure we have a portfolio of projects

If we’re targeting specific needs in our industry, it’s important to support what we can do through a portfolio of projects. Highlight the individual completed projects by building, construction project, or need. Consider this to be your case study.

Having these projects on the website can assist in taking the lead that came through Google and converting them into someone who contacts you.

2. Make it easy to get in touch with you

Once the construction SEO visitor comes into the website, are you making it easy for them to call you? Make sure to include simple things like your office location, your phone number, or an easy-to-use contact form that can get filled out quickly.

Your goal is to take this visitor and turn them into a marketing-qualified lead (MQL). Make sure that you’re putting the right tools in front of them to make this happen. Or else all of your SEO efforts might go unnoticed by the business.

SEO for Construction Companies: More Leads in 2024 is an original blog post first published on Go Fish Digital.

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.

Improve Your Pest Control Company Website for SEO is an original blog post first published on Go Fish Digital.

These pest control search terms and keywords are used to help find local service providers who can address pest control issues a customer might be facing. We’ll cover some of the most common pest control keywords, and which device types we see them searched in (as of July 2024). Lastly, I’ll include my best tips for what you might want to consider utilizing these pest control keywords for.

Key Takeaways

• Top search terms for pest control services include “pest control near me,” “best pest control near me,” and “affordable pest control near me.”
• Local variations may be added to these terms. For example, if you’re in the Chicago, IL area—you would see search terms for “pest control chicago” or “pest control chicago il.” Matches pages with the proper page intent will also get shown for local searchers who are in the Chicago, IL area and use the “pest control near me” query within Google.
• These pest control keywords can be used for pest control SEO campaigns, paid search campaigns, and market research to optimize existing websites for search marketing purposes.
• Some of the more interesting keywords include terms like “organic pest control” and “flea pest control” or “bed bug pest control” that contain highly specific issues that a customer is dealing with.

Top 100 Pest Control Keywords for SEO and Paid Campaigns

Here are the top 100 pest control keywords that can get used for SEO and paid search campaigns:

Free Download (CSV)

If you want to download a complete CSV/Excel file of these pest control SEO keywords, you can do that right here.

Best Tips for Utilizing These Pest Control SEO Keywords

Here are some of our best tips for utilizing these keywords:

1. Use for Topical Authority Building

Looking at these keywords give us specific issues, insects, and animals like:

1. Raccoon
2. Mice
3. Mole
4. Bird
5. Ant

Using these as opportunities to build out individual service pages for your pest control website could be a great way to utilize these keywords. Connect them together using an internal linking strategy and present a world-class website to your visitors by speaking to your specialities and what services that you provide.

2. Optimize Your Website

Using these keywords can help you to align your website to what the User is looking for. For example, “eco” or “organic” is a great keyword to see. And may help us better understand what other types of services or information a User might be looking for when they land on your website. If you provide these types of services. Or maybe your core business is all about these types of services, then it gives you a great opportunity to optimize parts of your website.

Optimizations should include looking at:

1. The H1 on your homepage or internal pages (like service pages or service area pages)
2. The meta description of your homepage (to help with click-through rate of when you’re presented on the SERPs)
3. Other opportunities to include services that you offer, however may have missed as being part of your website

3. Come Up With Other Service Offerings

If you’re in Arizona, as an example, however don’t offer scorpion pest control—this could be a great opportunity to talk with your team and consider offering this. It gives you a sense of the local demand in your area and for some service business or business owners, this may have simply been something you didn’t initially consider. Or maybe disregarded just due to the fact that you gauged the demand would be low.

Think of this as a type of market research and learning how to become more competitive in your local area by utilizing these keywords. Lastly, we can see the mention of some brands in frequently searched terms. Brands like “Orkin” or “Viking” might appear. This could be a queue to consider franchising opportunities if you’re starting a new business. Especially as the demand for these service providers is consistent and relevant to what you want to offer for your venture.

100 Pest Control Keywords for SEO and Paid Campaigns is an original blog post first published on Go Fish Digital.

Key takeaways

• “Pest Control SEO” is the act of optimizing pest control service websites for their presence in Google’s search engine results pages.
• Many pest control SEO campaigns fail to look at the domain’s overall authority as a factor that’s contributing to the lack of success for the service provider.
• Creating key supportive pages can increase a pest control company’s SEO authority by ensuring that they have designated pages around their residential and commercial offerings, the service areas they service, and the specific insect or rodent issues they help resolve. As a byproduct, creating entity (or embedding/vector) relationships across multiple pages under a single domain.

Keyword research and your pest control SEO targets

The primary objective of most pest control SEO is to fill a gap between customer demand and your offering whether it’s a service, product, directory, or some other type of business opportunity. Where most fail with keyword research is that they lean a little too heavily into the keyword. Rather, use it as a guide to understand how your target customer might find you. And how you can get a target page that you have in front of them.

According to a study by WebFX, “46% of Google searches are looking for local businesses.” And according to DemandSage, over 8.5 billion searches happen on Google every day. For those who might be thinking that “SEO” isn’t an ideal acquisition channel to invest in, the data would suggest otherwise.

Here are a few target keyword types that you might want to consider for your pest control company. A favorite tool to use for all keyword research is Ahrefs. Below, I’m going to include screenshots of those terms I discovered while thinking about offering pest control services in the Birmingham, AL area.

Related: 100 Pest Control Keywords for SEO

1. “Pest Control Near Me”

“Near me” pages are often linked to city and state pages. Most people fail with their pest control SEO endeavors by “over-optimizing” for keywords rather than over-optimizing for the customer journey. In fact, much of Google’s latest quality rater guidelines suggest that they’re looking for their teams to try and optimize the best web experience for Searchers rather than find or discover the most relevant pages. Tip: If you’re curious about what and who the “quality raters” are in Google, this is a wonderful resource on the task this team has in front of them.

I’ve seen homepages with meta titles (or page titles) that say things like, “Pest Control Services Near Me | Birmingham, AL”. It’s best to avoid that type of over-optimization in modern pest control SEO. It’s usually a key signal to Google’s rank systems that a page could be “spam potential.” Rather, like mentioned above, align your SEO strategy with the best customer experience. Google’s perspective could be, “We have enough pages to choose from, which is the best page to choose?”

When wanting to go after your “near me” terms, consider adjusting and targeting your homepage to these “near me” searches. 

As an example, some of the most common pest control SEO best practices that a homepage might lack are:

1. A lack of the city or state name in the meta title: If your page title is “Joe’s Pest Services,” Google is going to have a harder time creating a geospatial understanding of that page. Instead, choose something like, “Joe’s Pest Services | Birmingham, AL | Call Us Today!” A reference to the city and state in the homepage’s meta title will (at least in 2024) start to give you a presence for nearby customer demand and lead generation.
2. Failing to include target geographies in meta descriptions: While a meta description is no longer told to be a ranking factor, it does present another data point for the BERT engine to determine relevance. It’s an easy win to adjust your meta description over adjusting content on your homepage.

We’ll get more into your tactical optimization of these pest control service keywords shortly…

2. “Pest Control in [City/State]”

Just like with “near me” searches, you’re probably going to want to target specific city and state demand. Keywords like, “Pest Control in Birmingham” or “Pest Control in Birmingham AL.” If you’re a larger service provider, however, you may have multiple service areas that you serve.

And this should adjust the way that you think about your pest control SEO strategy. As an example, we suggested above that your homepage would target your “near me” searchers. However, if you have multiple cities that you serve, it’s probably best to create individualized pages that speak to your service areas.

Ahrefs and other tools may lack giving you great visibility into the cities that have search volume. However, don’t completely rely on Ahrefs or SEMrush for this.

You might come up with a list that looks like this:

1. Pest Control Birmingham AL
2. Pest Control Tamworth AL
3. Pest Control Coventry AL

As a result of these keywords, your top-level navigation may change and as a byproduct, the very healthy internal linking structure comes along with it. For example, a top-level navigation dropdown that says something like “Service Areas” with each individual service area page being designed to target those ideal customer personas.

Here’s an example of Chemwise playing out this exact SEO strategy for their pest control services:

We can see a few page titles ready to optimize to further their strategy forward, as well. Note: Naperville (229) which appears to be a phone number, however, not being loved by Google.

3. “Pest Control in [Neighborhoods]”

Similar to the above, another strategy for keywords that is often overlooked is the application of neighborhoods as a target for your pest control services. Usually, tools like Ahrefs will show very small volumes of monthly search presence for these types of keywords.

However, building neighborhood service pages only for extremely large cities (like New York City, Los Angeles, or Chicago) can certainly help in getting demand from those who might be looking for same-day services or emergency pest control services.

Avoid doing this if you’re not in a large city. Mostly because there simply won’t be any purpose for your effort. You’ll need to consider whether neighborhood names make it part of the regular vocabulary. For example, “West Village” (New York City) would be a good one to consider. However, some boroughs are also thought of as cities.

In that case, you might have something of a pest control website structure as something like this:

1. Homepage: Pest Control Services in New York City
2. Service Page: Pest Control Services in Manhattan, NY (Borough)
3. Service Page: Pest Control Services in Brooklyn, NY (Borough)
4. Service Page: Pest Control Services in West Village, NY (Neighborhood)

These supplemental service pages give you the right page targeting for your campaign.

Before we get into how to begin optimizing your pages and website for these target terms, let’s talk about a few foundational components that will increase your chances of success…

GMB listings and your brand’s foundation

There’s no avoiding this fact, when your pest control customers start their local service search journey, they’ll be immediately slammed with the “Businesses” panel that shows up in Google. This is often called “GMB” or “Google My Business.” These are the GMB listings that will most likely receive most of the first-clicks from Searchers:

Because of this, you’re really targeting your SEO strategy around targeting the “first clicks” that happen after the scroll of local businesses:

It’s important to make sure that you do have a presence in that “Business” panel listing (GMB optimization). And here’s the main reason: your GMB optimization helps your organic SEO efforts. Let me explain…

1. Real people with real reviews

“Gaming” GMB reviews is quite a difficult task (and never recommended). Google has done a tremendous job of ensuring that very little spam is available in GMB reviews. Because of this, they’ve utilized some of these reviews to draw connections between entities (more on that soon, think of an “entity” as a noun — a person, a place, a thing).

The real reviews of real people act as a type of “brand mention” very similar to the effect of earning a backlink. These brand mentions, think of a review like, “Using Pete’s pest services was really amazing. I appreciated everything they do for the Birmingham area” gives a lot of clues for Google’s rank systems to put weight toward your overall authority (site authority or domain authority).

In fact, you can see this sometimes when you Google certain services and the BERT engine decides to bold certain keywords in the User reviews.

2. History of your pest control company in Google’s results

Thinking about “reputation management” or optimizing your Google My Business presence can also help to draw connections between your entity and your website. For example, your Google My Business listing should have:

1. Accurate business hours
2. Accurate phone number
3. Accurate business address
4. A linked website URL
5. A linked phone number to call

When these data points are also present in your global footer or top navigation it creates a nice relationship with the GMB profile and your business. This relationship helps Google to connect any additional dots that might be available. For example, the length of time that you’ve been in the pest control business.

You’d be surprised at how some of these factors are being considered in the overall potential to rank your website for your target keywords.

3. Real (and unique) photography of you and your pest control service employees

Similar to how phone numbers, social media profiles, and other “validating” information can be connected to your GMB profile and the website, this can be done through photography, too. An “About us” page might include pictures of your team. Or real pictures of your service members.

If you place stock photography inside these listings, there’s a chance that this “less unique” photography not only does a disservice to your CTR (Click Through Rate) but also the overall call rate.

4. Because people do click on GMB listings!

There’s just no avoiding the fact that there are a lot of clicks that happen on those GMB listings. Especially on mobile. And when thinking about your SEO strategy, it’s best to think about it holistically. As a channel in addition to all the other marketing channels you have and how they play a role together. Many businesses who are just solely focused on SEO actually have a more difficult time getting traction than those who are adding pest control SEO as an acquisition channel into their marketing tactics.

Foundational pages, your topical authority, and what you might be missing in your pest control SEO approach

Aside from simply ranking target pages to target keywords (i.e., “pest control services in Birmingham AL”), there’s usually a miss when it comes to service providers’ websites and why they’re not performing.

I mentioned I would start to speak about entities. A simple way to think about this is persons, places, or things. When you search on Google, they often know that one thing has a relationship to many other things. For example, if you search New York City, they’ll know population size, zip codes, and other key information about the geography. FatJoe does a great job of explaining it, “An entity in SEO is a record on a search engine database that represents something. An entity can be a person, place, product, event, idea, or brand. Google defines an entity as ‘a thing or concept that is singular, unique, well-defined and distinguishable.’” We’ll get into why that’s important in a moment…

Just to give you a visual for this concept, you can see these entities appear in the SERPs in this example when searching New York City:

These relationships are often referred to as vectors, embeddings, or “entities.” For the sake of this article, I’ll refer to them as entities.

So let’s say we’re discussing pest control. Then there are some potentially aligned entities that we can think about. The directory might go as follows:

1. Animals and Insects:
   1. Rats
   2. Mice
   3. Bed Bugs
   4. Cockroaches
   5. Fleas
   6. Spiders
   7. Ants

If I were to ask you, “What types of insects and animals would you consider to be pests?” You would probably come up with a list very similar to this. And then if you were to ask an expert on the street, “What types of insects and rodents are considered to be pests in the area?” They should be able to recite a list very similar to this as well, right?

And that’s the concept and purpose behind this whole “entity” and “entity SEO” thing…

The way that Google’s engines are beginning to work is by looking at entity presence and relationships across multiple pages of an overall domain. And then using that as a scoring mechanism for the entire website to give it that “authority” status.

In short, this gives them the ability to put higher-quality websites higher up on the search results. Pages that are “from experts.”

This is how it plays out for you on the other end of this as a Google Searcher. Let’s say were a prospective pest control customer or lead, you’re probably going to want to look into whether the company you’re about to call can actually service the type of rodent or insect issue you have (i.e., a mouse problem, a rat problem, etc.) Voila, the website you’ve landed on addresses those questions!

We can see this exact type of “entity SEO” play out with Broadway Pest Services in New York City. They rank #2 for “pest control in Manhattan” and this is what their top-level navigation looks like:

We can see individual pages that speak to these “entities” and have unique, insightful, and helpful content on each of these individual pages. In addition, they interweave between each other using a clear internal linking strategy.

For many business owners looking to optimize their SEO presence, they might not be considering these internal or lower priority pages as important to their SEO campaign. However, they should be!

1. Service pages and topic coverage

Very similar to having specific service pages that align with our “entity SEO” approach, individual city pages have the same effect. A general rule of thumb is to create a service page and internal linking structure of your website that properly reflects your subject matter expertise for pest services.

For example, if you’re in Arizona, you might include “scorpions” as a service page. Not only does this do a service for any searchers who are looking for something like the following:

• Scorpion Pest Control in Chandler AZ

It also provides you with authority around this type of keyword, too:

• Pest Control Chandler AZ

The key difference is merely the target page you’re using to focus in on these keywords. Think of it as a pretty simple best practice:

1. Homepage: Should always target your “top-level” keyword. Things like “Pest Control in X” (which will also target any “near me” keywords).
2. Service Pages: Targeting local specific rodents or insects, like “scorpions,” “ants,” or something else.
3. City and Local Pages: Targeting a specific city, borough, or neighborhood pending your service area coverage.

You can see this very same strategy playing out with Broadway Pest Services as well. Their inclusion of “Service Areas” in the top-level navigation gives Google’s engines everything it wants to know.

Is the website authoritative around the subject it speaks to? (EEAT) In the quality rater guidelines, “The authoritativeness of the creator, the main content itself and the website.”

We can see that the answer is yes! And here’s how Broadway Pest Services did it:

1. 1. Broadway Pest Services — Areas We Serve
      1. Brooklyn
      2. Queens
      3. And so on…

Why don’t more pest control companies do this when thinking about their SEO strategy? Generally, most SEO campaigns begin with a keyword. And that’s an older way of thinking about SEO. Thanks to the improvements Google’s made to its engines, we have to think more holistically about our website experience and authority and ensure that we’re providing Google with both target pages that aim to meet specific keywords and indirect pages that don’t target keywords and rather, target authority.

2. “About us” pages

Very similar to service and city pages, “About us” pages give Google’s engines even more understanding of the overall authority of the publisher of the website. These “About us” pages are often forgotten about as part of the core strategy for service provider pages. Why is that? Generally, the assumption is that Search visitors aren’t going to an About page.

And while that’s most likely true, these types of pages still hold a lot of value for Google’s engines to help increase overall site authority.

Here’s another great example of this by Broadway Pest Services:

We can see phrases like “50+ years of expert pest control solutions.” When I think about Trust or Authority (per Google’s EEAT factors), phrases like this really stick out to me. In addition, a “customer promise” that appears on the page is another way to really speak to Trust.

If you were shopping on an e-commerce website and it didn’t have any pages that speak to its refund policy or product guarantee are you going to potentially better or worse experience with that brand? There’s a greater chance that it will be a worse experience than a brand that prioritizes telling you about their refund policy.

The same thing applies to an “About us” page. It’s your opportunity to show passion, trust, authority, and security in what you provide. And Google’s engines (while we don’t know the exact percentage) certainly take these things into consideration.

Pest control SEO best practices to target your ideal keywords

If you’ve gotten all the way down here, then you’ve made it past the newer concepts regarding Google’s analysis of all of your pages under a given domain to give it authority (that will help it perform the best). However, what are some of the basics to look for? Many GoFish clients have some missing best practices that don’t give them the best shot of being performant. Let’s use our example website, Broadway Pest Control, and break down what they did well when it comes to their “pest control SEO” efforts:

1. Presence of their target keyword in the H1

Often overlooked and simple enough. Ensure that there’s a presence of your target keyword for the page intent type in the H1:

We can see the presence of “pest control in Manhattan” as part of their headline.

Read more: Improve your pest control company website for SEO

2. Not over-optimizing what they offer for SEO

Injecting “pest control in Manhattan” over and over again into the page is just going to trigger some of the spam controls Google has in place (yes, there are obviously systems to prevent spam from appearing in SERPs).

Broadway Pest Services does a great job of thinking about what questions the customer has. And how to properly address those questions. Yet, including small adjustments that mention locations that they service. Making them relevant to their target keyword.

In short, think about your H2’s and H3’s. These are simple areas to add some relevancy to your page. These minor adjustments won’t trigger those age-old “keyword stuffing” tactics that are “long gone” in the world of SEO.

3. A helpful internal linking strategy

For someone dealing with a particular problem, there’s an individual service page that addresses each of these issues. In addition, a clear and well-designed internal linking strategy that connects these pages together (once again, creating that site or domain authority that Google prefers).

We can see a well-designed way to learn more about all the types of insects, bugs, and rodent problems that the company services.

4. Helpful and relevant paragraph text on internal pages

It’s a fairly common mistake to think about “unique content” as being something other than what the customer is looking for. For example, a common tactic when targeting city or state local searches is to describe the city or the state’s facts or figures (like their population, average income, and facts about the cities history). However, that’s not relevant content to include on the page. 

Broadway Pest Services does a great job of speaking to their services in the area and including their target terms (i.e., “Fordham Heights, NY”) without it becoming irrelevant text. For example, think if you went to look for a birthday cake recipe and were being told the history of eating with forks. It’s just simply not what you’re looking for.

Keep all of your page content relevant AND optimized for your target audience and keywords. However, don’t overdo it. Think about the common questions that someone wants to know when investigating your services and answer them (and no… that doesn’t mean including FAQs at the bottom of the page—try to integrate answers to the common questions throughout the entire page itself).

Other things potentially impacting pest control SEO performance

I’ve spoken a lot about some rather “new” strategies here. However, these ones are certainly being embraced more widely already. And have great supportive evidence for showing that they work.

However, it’s important to note that if you’re not seeing success with your campaign, a few other reasons could be:

1. Technical SEO: Is your HTML up to par? Simply put, technical SEO audits can help to ensure that Google’s crawlers are properly picking up your page content. And if they can’t properly pick up your page content, then there’s very little chance that the automated engines can assess what I spoke about above. Make sure that you have a foundation to build on. Do you have a properly formatted XML sitemap submitted to Google? Are all of your pages indexable? These basic questions can go a long way in eliminating the “guessing game” of SEO (as it sometimes can feel).
2. Reputation Management: If you have a brand new service offering in the area. Then you’re not going to have as many reviews of your business. Or mentions of your business. This could be acting as a type of “backlink” strategy that you don’t really have. It’s important to consider how building reviews, ensuring your GMB listing is optimized, and the overall length of time that you’ve had customers (especially if you’re new) is having an impact on your SEO campaign.
3. Search Intent: If you’re writing blog posts and hoping to target keywords like “Pest Control in Birmingham,” you’re probably not going to do very well. Google has a great way of determining this. Stamford Digital does a great job of summarizing this. Saying, “Google knows when a user carries out a search and doesn’t find what they are looking for. They get a signal sent back each time this happens, and it is these signals that help the search engine giant understand that the intent and results are likely mismatched.” Relevance, User satisfaction, and lower bounce rates play a role here. If a User lands on your “blog post” page and expected to see a service page, this would send them back to Google, creating a negative “point” for the page to Search match. In short, make sure that you know what these page intent types are and how your search queries align with them.

GoFishDigital is happy to help pest control companies with their SEO, reputation management, and local listing campaigns. Request an RFP today.

Guide to SEO for Pest Control Companies (2024) is an original blog post first published on Go Fish Digital.