For many business owners, there is nothing as stressful as making sure they have enough customers each month. In some trades, there is an abundance of work, so much that they are jacking up their rates exponentially, but in other markets, there is a constant struggle to ensure that there are customers all year round.
What do tradies normally do for advertising?
There is a wide array of successful marketing tactics used by business owners in the major metropolitan centres in Australia that yield great results. But none greater than digital marketing.
So how can you use digital marketing to help you grow your business and make sure your profits are always on the up? Let’s have a look at a case study involving a Newcastle Tree Removal company and see what has worked for them in growing their arborist services throughout their service region.
Social Media vs SEO – What Works?
This is a question that we run into all the time. Which is going to be the best form of advertising for my business? What is going to provide me with the best ROI?
There is no doubt that social media has taken over all of our lives. Companies are investing a ridiculous amount into their social media accounts in the hope of creating the next viral video that will ensure their profits skyrocket. But is it going to help you grow your business?
Here are some statistics to help. This first chart shows that the majority of investment of Australian tradies into their digital marketing is spent on organic social media. This means they are hiring companies to create content for them and promote their channels. Conversely, notice the small amount of investment in the market on SEO (Search Engine Optimisation).
And this is where things get interesting!
This next chart highlights the actual return on investment of each form of digital marketing:
Despite the massive investment in organic social media, SEO and paid ads provide a markedly greater return on investment.
Now we are not bagging out social media. We provide social media maintenance and promotion for our clients. But don’t throw all of your eggs in one basket. If you really want your business to grow and reach more targeted customers, we highly recommend our SEO services.
Let’s Get To The Root Of It…With A Newcastle Tree Removal Case Study
Here is an example of a small arborist and tree maintenance company that operates throughout Newcastle, Lake Macquarie and Port Stephens.
We will take a second to analyse some of their SEO strategies and highlight what is working and producing results.
To get things started, here is a screenshot of the website:
Exact Match Domain
Domain – newcastletreeandstumpremoval.com.au
Now this is interesting.
What is the company name? Cutting Edge Tree Maintenance.
So they are using a range of keywords in their domain instead of their company name.
What do you think? Is that a wise option?
Here is some advice from Moz.com:
“Your domain name is your brand—it’s who you are when you’re online. If you’re thinking “Should I have an exact match domain name?”, think about whether this is the right brand for you and your business. If it just so happens that “vegan supermarket” encapsulates everything you want to be about, then go for it. If not, it may be worth investigating other domain name options.
Whether your exact match domain will help push you up in the rankings for that search query is questionable, but it certainly isn’t as powerful a ranking signal as it once was. In fact, an exact match domain may even be penalized by Google! An update to their algorithm in 2012 was aimed at weeding out exact match domains from spammy websites from their search results”
Moz.com
So in this case, using an exact match domain is a savvy decision. It does incorporate some of the main keywords the company is hoping to rank highly for as well as establish their primary location. So while an exact match domain does not provide the SEO benefits that it did years ago, it still can assist you in helping to identify your services and service location to potential customers quickly and efficiently.
SEO Title and Meta Description
If you have read some of our other SEO articles here on Tradiebots.com.au (such as How To Advertise As A Tradie) you will undoubtedly have noticed that we are always harping on about making sure you optimise your SEO title tags. So let’s examine the SEO title and meta description on the homepage of Cutting Edge Tree Maintenance.
<title>Tree Removal Newcastle – Arborists – Cutting Edge Tree Maintenance </title>
<meta name=”description” content=” Affordable tree removal in Newcastle! Arborist services in Newcastle, Port Stephens & Lake Macquarie. Call for a FREE quote today! “>
All I can say is… magnificent!
Priority 1 is making sure that your primary keyword is at the start of the SEO title. And that is exactly where we find “Tree Removal Newcastle”. Perfect. An additional keyword is followed up after the hyphen and then the correctly formatted business name.
This is the exact formula that you can use for your tradie business.
Suggested SEO Title process:
- Identify your primary keyword – Use a tool like semrush.com to find search volumes. Find a keyword that describes your services and has a significant search volume.
- Edit your SEO tag using the following formula:
<title>(primary keyword with location) – (short secondary keyword) – (business name) </title>
We recommend using capital letters for each word in your SEO title. This will ensure the title is easy to read when it appears in the search engine results.
For example:
Keyword Choice
After analysing the SEO title, we can see that the company has identified Tree Removal Newcastle as their primary keyword.
Is that a good choice? Let’s look at the data.
Here are the details for this keyword along with other related keywords:
Going through the columns, volume refers to the average number of monthly searches for a keyword over a 12-month period. KD% is Keyword Difficulty %. This metric shows you how hard it would be for a website to rank organically in the Google top 10 for a listed keyword. The higher the percentage, the harder it will be to achieve high rankings.
So with that in mind, what is the best primary keyword for arborist and tree surgeon in Newcastle?
“Tree Removal Newcastle” is the winner. Would you agree?
It has the highest average search volume. So this means that this is the phrase that potential customers are most likely to use. And that is not a guess or an assumption, this is the data to back that up. Additionally, it has a relatively easy keyword difficulty rating of 14. Especially compared with keywords such as “Newcastle Council Tree Removal” wherein you would be up against the Newcastle.nsw.gov domain which has excellent domain authority.
So once again, that is a win by Cutting Edge Tree Maintenance.
SEO Results
Sure having a shiny motor in your sports car is impressive, but we want to see the results it produces on the track!
So has there been a growth in the SEO results for this tree maintenance company?
Oof…this screams success.
Check out this massive boost in organic traffic due to some recent SEO efforts.
Note that this is not paid traffic. These are real customers who are searching for keywords used by the company and then clicking on their website on the search engine results page.
This is the key to growing and scaling your business. This is how you can secure success for your tradie business whether you are located in a large city centre or a regional town.
SEO provides exceptional ROI for business owners who are savvy enough to invest in it for the long term.
Hopefully, you can garner some tips from this article that will help you to make some efforts in the SEO for your company.
