SEO for Home Services: Expert Strategies, Costs + Examples

Home services SEO helps HVAC, plumbing, electrical, and other home service businesses rank on Google. It can cost $1,000-$5,000 a month to boost visibility and traffic for your local company. Learn how to build an SEO strategy that works + see examples of successful campaigns.

Using SEO for home services helps businesses in HVAC, plumbing, electrical, and other home service providers appear in Google search to attract potential customers.

But how do you build an SEO strategy for your local business?

Let’s dive into the unique challenges businesses face with SEO for home services, typical costs, and expert tips to do it successfully.

What is home services SEO?

Home services SEO is strategically optimizing websites in the home services industry to rank organically on search engines like Google and Bing. Since home services businesses operate in specific geographic areas, these companies must focus on optimizing for local search results.

Why do home service businesses need SEO?

Search engine optimization should be a part of every home service company’s digital marketing strategy. It’s one of the most affordable ways to boost online visibility and drive organic traffic to your website. In fact, the top traffic source for all websites is organic search.

Homeowners often look for local services in an emergency, like a broken AC or a roof replacement. When they head to the search engine, they’ll likely click on one of the first results. Research shows the number one organic result is 10x more likely to receive a click than a result on page 10.

SEO is also a measurable strategy that allows you to directly contribute site and call traffic to your SEO efforts. With this data, you can easily tweak your strategy to do more of what’s working and less of what’s not so you see better results over time.

SEO for home services pricing

SEO pricing for home services websites is between $1,000 to $5,000 per month, depending on the campaign. The average price for local SEO is a bit lower at $500 to $1,000 per month.

How to build your home service SEO strategy

If you want your website to appear on the top of the search engine results page (SERP), create an SEO strategy. Here are the steps for developing a strategy for home service businesses.

1. Do an SEO audit
2. Conduct keyword research
3. Create an SEO content strategy
4. Build location pages
5. Measure your results

1. Do an SEO audit

You can’t improve SEO for your home services website until you know what’s missing or broken. An SEO audit is a review of your website from a technical and content perspective, identifying SEO issues your company should fix.

An SEO audit covers three aspects of SEO — technical, on-page, and off-page.

Technical SEO

When analyzing technical SEO, do the following:

• Check to see which web pages are indexed in the search engines.
• Test page speed and identify any pages with slow load times.
• Review your site for mobile-friendliness and adjust the website design for a better user experience.
• Look at user behavior metrics like bounce rate and average session duration to see how visitors interact with the pages.

On-page SEO

There are several elements to analyze during an on-page SEO audit. Here’s how to do it:

• See which keywords the site currently ranks for and identify any “low-hanging fruit” pages that could potentially rank higher with just a few tweaks.
• Identify any website pages with thin content, then add details and examples to make the page more useful.
• Find any pages lacking metadata — meta descriptions, title tags, and alt tags (or the information they have isn’t long enough).
• Check for duplicate content and decide whether to combine pages/posts or update the content so it’s unique.

Off-page SEO

Here are a few things to look for when auditing off-page SEO:

• Review backlinks and identify any links that may be harmful, like those from sites with offensive or irrelevant content.
• Decide if you need to disavow backlinks that could negatively impact your domain rating.
• Review or create a link building strategy for attracting high-quality, relevant backlinks.
• Review your social media marketing and guest posting strategies to find new ways to get your links in front of your target audience.

Once your audit is complete, you’ll have a list of issues to address and ideas to improve your SEO.

Ready to get started? Check out our guide on how to conduct an SEO audit.

2. Conduct keyword research

To rank on the first page of Google Search, create a keyword strategy that combines local search terms with service-based keywords. For example, “[service] in [city + state],” “[service] near me,” and “[city] [service]” are common keywords for home services.

Use a free tool like Google Keyword Planner to research your home service business’s target keywords.

After entering a few starting keyword phrases, Google Keyword Planner will provide additional keyword ideas while showing the average monthly searches, competition, and other information for each keyword.

Choose keywords your business has the best chance to rank for. For instance, keywords with a higher search volume and lower competition.

3. Create an SEO content strategy

Once you have a list of keywords to target, create an SEO content strategy. When developing topics for your home services SEO content strategy, consider the following:

• Keyword intent. What do searchers hope to find when typing in your keywords? Do they want to find more information? Buy something? Navigate to a specific page?
• Customer journey. Where is the reader in their customer journey when searching for this topic? For example, look at the broader topic if they’re at the top of the funnel.
• Internal linking opportunities. Internal linking helps search engines understand your content, and readers get more useful information. Map out your internal linking strategy as you create topics.
• Competitor content. Look at what content currently ranks for these keywords. Can you create a better piece of content? Or add something new to the conversation?

Next, plan who will write the content and when it’ll be published. Don’t forget to include metadata like the title tag, meta description, and alt tags for any images.

4. Build location pages

Local businesses with multiple locations should build SEO pages optimized for location keywords. For example, if you operate out of Atlanta, GA, but also serve the wider metropolitan area, you could create location pages for each city.

Reliable Heating & Air in Atlanta, GA is a home services company using location pages to rank for services in different cities. It has a location page for each city it services in the greater metropolitan area.

The company tailored each location page to a specific city. While most home services companies offer the same services in each city, it can still tailor the content to that specific community.

Reliable Heating & Air does that with this SEO location page for Marietta, Georgia. The copy mentions specific organizations the company services that Marietta homeowners would be familiar with, helping to build trust within that community.

5. Measure your results

Measure results regularly to see if your SEO efforts are helping your search rankings. Google Search Console and Google Analytics are two free tools companies can use for SEO tracking.

“Tracking is an essential part of SEO campaigns for home service companies,” says Sam Yadegar, CEO of HawkSEM. “We use ConversionIQ (CIQ) to track every aspect of our SEO campaigns to identify what’s working and what we need to tweak to optimize toward a higher ROI year-over-year.”

Here are just a few metrics you can measure to understand how your SEO campaign is performing.

• Keyword rankings: Determine where you rank for the target keywords you identified as part of your content marketing strategy.
• Organic traffic: Identify the number of visitors you drive to your website from organic search.
• Clickthrough rate (CTR): Discover how many people click through to your site from the search engine.
• Bounce rate: Measure how many people visit your site but don’t interact with the content.
• Conversion rate: Find out how many people convert on the page vs. how many total people visit the page.
• Time on page: Identify the average amount of time a person spends on the page reading and interacting with your content.

Local SEO for home services tips

Now that we’ve got the basics down let’s dive into some tips for local SEO for home services.

1. Optimize your Google Business profile
2. Audit existing local citations and listings
3. Ask customers for reviews
4. Monitor and respond to reviews
5. Set up call-tracking

1. Optimize your Google Business profile

Your Google Business profile (formerly Google My Business) is one of the best tools for getting more local, qualified leads from Google search. An optimized profile boosts your local ranking, increases engagement, and converts more customers.

Here’s an example of an optimized Google Business profile for an HVAC company in Austin, TX:

The profile has buttons users can click to navigate to their website, get directions to the office, call the office, and share the listing with someone else. The overview is also completely filled out with information about store hours, phone number, website, address, services, and service areas.

This Google Business Profile also appears on Google Maps when someone performs a relevant local search. Always update your address and contact information on the profile so people know how to get ahold of you.

2. Audit existing local citations and listings

In addition to optimizing your Google Business Profile, it’s good to audit existing local SEO citations or listings. Claim the listings (if possible) and ensure all the information is up-to-date and accurate.

These types of listings can be local directories like your city’s chamber of commerce or customer review sites like Yelp, Angi (formerly Angie’s List), and Thumbtack.

Keeping the information up-to-date is useful for users who find you through these online directories. However, these listings also show up on the search engines, so anyone who finds you in the search engine can view the information on these profiles, not just directory users.

For example, if we Google McCollough Heating and Air, we see the company’s website as the first search result. But below that, you see the Yelp and Facebook pages rank in spots 2 and 3.

3. Ask customers for reviews

Customer reviews appear on searches, and can influence potential customers. In fact, a 2023 report by PowerReviews shows over 90% of customers consider reviews when making a purchasing decision.

So ask your best customers to leave your business a review on Google and other review sites like Yelp. Positive reviews are impactful for SEO, and can increase your clickthrough and conversion rates.

4. Monitor and respond to reviews

Asking for reviews is just the first step. To create a powerful and positive online presence, actively manage your customer reviews. This requires your team to monitor the places where customers leave reviews and respond to them.

If the review is positive, your response can be as simple as, “We’re happy to hear you’ve had a positive experience. We look forward to serving you again in the future!”

If the review is negative, it’s best to be apologetic and find a way to remedy the situation if you haven’t already. You may include information about how your team plans to make changes moving forward based on this feedback.

Remember, future customers are reading these reviews, and they may be the first impression of your home services company. So, be mindful of how you reply to reviews across channels.

5. Set up call-tracking

Set up call tracking to better understand how your SEO efforts have impacted the number of service calls you receive. Call tracking identifies where callers come from — Google Business Profile, organic website visitors, or PPC ad traffic.

Once you’ve set up call tracking, look at how many calls are coming in, where they came from, and the quality of the calls. With this information, make a data-driven decision about where to focus your efforts moving forward.

Examples of SEO for home services

To see the power of home services SEO at work, let’s look at examples of home service businesses that do SEO well.

Nick’s Plumbing

When we search for “plumber Houston TX,” Nick’s Plumbing is the first organic search result. Before we click on the page, we can see the title tag is optimized for local search — “Nick’s Plumbing Services Houston | Find a Plumber in Houston.”

The meta description also uses keyword terms that include both the service and location — “plumbing services in Houston” and “licensed plumber in Houston.”

In this case, the company optimized its homepage for local service keywords around Houston and plumbing services.

This website page effectively presents the services Nick’s Plumbing offers with keywords like “Plumbing installation in Houston,” “Plumbing repairs in Houston,” and “Water heater services in Houston.”

The copy also links to internal service pages that provide more detailed information. This helps Google understand the context of the website while educating human users  about the service before reaching out.

One Hour Air Conditioning & Heating

One Hour Air Conditioning & Heating is an HVAC franchise with locations nationwide. When we Google “AC repair in Tampa, FL,” the web page for the company’s Tampa location appears as the third organic search result.

Note that the top 2 results for this search term are customer review sites. That’s why it’s so important to claim your listings and optimize those profiles as well!

The One Hour Tampa page is a great example of an SEO location page that’s optimized for keywords related to the service area.

The SEO copy on the page caters to Tampa homeowners. While the information gives a rather broad look at the company’s services, the page uses keyword phrases like “AC repair in Tampa, FL” and “HVAC service provider in Tampa.”

Long Horn Roofing

Keywords won’t always be as easy as “[service] in [city].” Sometimes, homeowners will search for more specific keyword phrases when they need something more than general service information.

When searching for “roofers with free estimates near me,” a blog post from Longhorn Roofing appears in the number one spot. I live in Austin, TX, so the result is from an Austin business. If you were to search for the same thing, the results would be from businesses in your area.

The blog post gives the reader necessary information about roofing estimates in Austin. While the goal is to drive readers to get an estimate from Longhorn Roofing, the blog provides generally useful information about why you need a roofing estimate and what the estimate includes.

At the end of the post, there’s a call to action to get a free estimate from Longhorn Roofing. Internal links are throughout the post that lead to additional useful information about hiring a roofer.

SEO agency for home services

Many businesses in the home services industry hire SEO agencies for search engine optimization and ongoing management. Hiring an SEO marketing company can improve online visibility and drive more qualified leads and customers.

Here’s what to look for when hiring an SEO company:

• Experience: Find an SEO agency with home services experience. This industry has unique challenges in SEO that not all agencies understand.
• Results: Look at the agency’s past results for businesses like yours. Consider if/how they’ve helped home service companies drive organic web traffic and conversions.
• Dedicated campaign manager: Some agencies rely on AI to do much of the heavy lifting with SEO. Look for an SEO company that gives you a dedicated campaign manager and strategist to lead your campaign.
• Additional services: Additional services like pay-per-click (PPC) ads — or Google ads — can accelerate your SEO results. Find an SEO service provider who understands how these two strategies can work together.

One size doesn’t fit all in SEO, so if the agency isn’t customizing the strategy for your specific business, they can’t deliver the best SEO results.

The team at HawkSEM starts by learning about your business, target audience, and buyer personas before creating a custom SEO strategy.

“Every SEO campaign we manage has a senior strategist that’s leading the efforts,” Yadegar says. “There’s always a human managing and watching over the campaign and its progress.”

And our custom approach to SEO for home services shows in our results. By using HawkSEM’s SEO services for HVAC companies, NorthStock increased conversions by 53%.

The takeaway

Focusing on SEO for home services will boost your business’s visibility online, bring more qualified leads and customers to your website, and improve conversions over time. However, developing an SEO strategy and managing your campaign can be challenging, especially if you’re new to SEO.

Hiring an SEO marketing agency specializing in SEO for home service businesses provides all the benefits of SEO without figuring it out on your own, which is time-consuming and costly.

The team at HawkSEM would love to be your SEO agency. Our team has worked with businesses in the home services industry and has run many successful local SEO campaigns.

Ready to get started? Book a consultation with our team today.