By Matthew Smith
Home services businesses that partner with digital marketing companies are often encouraged to follow a particular set of "best practices." While it is a concept you should know, it is also essential to understand why you should follow best practices when marketing yourself online.
Some benefits of following best practices guidelines are:
● Better online positioning to achieve maximum performance
● Compliance with rules and regulations of different vendors and state laws
● Improved standing with a platform's algorithm
● Increased engagement based on trends in specific types of content
By definition, a best practice is a procedure shown by research and experience to produce optimal results and proposed as a standard suitable for widespread adoption. Interestingly, best practices tend to be heavily influenced by relevance, meaning that what might be today's best practice may not be tomorrow.
It is crucial to understand that a best practice isn't merely a mandated "to-do list" but a framework for building a professional, consistent brand online.
When it comes to digital marketing, there are several areas that you should stringently apply best practices to, and they are:
● Google’s Best Practice
● Paid ads
● SEO/Website
● Content/Blogs/Facebook
● Video
● Marketing Mix
Let’s take an in-depth look at each area and explore how you can apply them to your digital marketing strategy.
Google's Best Practices
Google's best practices can influence how well you perform online, so it is essential to integrate them into your broader efforts to gain brand visibility. They have multiple platforms and algorithms to abide by to stay visible, relevant, and authoritative. Google primarily focuses on user experience in the same way that a business might emphasize a customer's experience. Fortunately, Google makes every effort to let businesses know their best practices for ads, keywords, and ranking factors through their skill shop.
Paid Ads
There are many platforms where paid ads can run. They include Google, Local Service Ads, Yelp, Facebook, Home Advisor/Angie's List, Premium Directories, Yahoo/Bing, Houzz, and Thumbtack.
When choosing which platform to use, go with whichever one will give you the most business for your particular growth goals. This can mean using different channels for different things. But make sure your brand voice is present throughout, and that it's the same as on your website and its pages. It's also vital to make every page on your website dynamic, so when a visitor lands on them, the phone number and optimization change according to that person's location.
Paid ads can be especially effective when used in tandem with machine learning technology, which allows you to analyze the data generated by your advertising and give you the ability to make adjustments based on performance. This technology can also assist your bidding strategy by generating automated bids, campaigns, and set up keywords.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
You may have also heard of best practices for SEO. This relates to your content and its ability to show up in Google search while assisting your website’s ability to rank for different search terms. Google’s algorithm will look at the optimization of a website to determine relevancy, as well as if it provides a good user experience. Therefore, it is crucial to understand content arrangement, appropriate verbiage, and proper keyword placement can improve your SEO. Ensure your website is responsive on all platforms, has good readability, and is fully optimized for your local or target areas.
Content, Blogs, and Facebook Posts
Posting content on your website, Facebook, Instagram, or other online and offline channels is an incredibly impactful form of marketing. Some widely accepted best practices for online content are:
● All content should be original.
● Avoid plagiarized content.
● Make sure it's relevant to your target audience.
● Make it easy and quick to read or watch.
Your content should be an ongoing focus. Frequent updates will keep your company top-of-mind and help build a customer base. It's all about engaging with your customers, promoting brand awareness, and providing value to the community by being an online information hub.
Video
If you can write a blog, you can write a script. Videos are the visual accompaniment to your content and can go a long way towards boosting your visibility. Research shows that people tend to be more eager to consume video content than read an article. So it's important to recognize what your audience's online habits are.
How-to videos are among the most-watched on home services-related channels on YouTube. By integrating SEO practices into your content, you have the ability for your videos to show up in Google search.
Diverse Marketing Mix
All of these best practices feed into each other to create something known as a Marketing Mix. It is ideal for your mix to consist of varied marketing approaches to match a diverse customer purchase cycle. You want to touch on several points along that journey so that the customer chooses your company’s services at the end of it.
There are countless tools and platforms to utilize in your business's marketing in this day and age. Ultimately, it is your decision as a business owner on how to approach it all. As long as you adhere to the widely accepted digital marketing best practices of your field, you can help ensure your brand's longevity and success.
Matthew Smith is a Marketing Manager for Home Services at Scorpion, a premium provider of marketing and technology solutions for the home services industry. Coming from the world of restaurants and fine dining to marketing home service businesses has been an adventure that has led to higher learning, strategic planning, and growth. Matthew is passionate about achieving business goals on behalf of his clients. When he's not being a digital marketing wizard, Matthew can be found caring for his family, spending time with friends, or posting at sporting events as an EMT.