Did you know that 93% of all online experiences begin with a search engine, and businesses that blog generate 67% more leads than those that don’t?
Field service business (FSB) is hard in terms of planning. Whether it’s landscape design, plumbing, or HVAC, it requires logistics, transportation, scheduling, and a lot of licensing paperwork.
Every good field service-based business plan should also include marketing. Word-of-mouth is going to be the source of some of your best clients, but it’s unreliable. You need a low-effort marketing plan that won’t take much time away from your main job and will provide a stream of new clients in the area of operation.
Paid advertising and organic social media reach are definitely a part of marketing efforts for FSBs. You should also be adding content marketing to the mix. Create and optimize content about your industry, and it will remain on Google for years, bringing you traffic and leads.
This guide will walk you through how you can do that.
Creating great field service business content and optimizing it takes a lot of planning and upfront investment. Here are three major reasons you might want to consider giving it a try.
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- Enhanced Search Visibility and Brand Awareness
Well-written content that’s optimized for search engines is likely to rank high on search engine result pages (SERP). This means people who search for problems related to your line of work will end up reading your content and will learn about your company.
They’ll be more likely to refer to you when they have a problem that you can help with or even refer to their friends and family.
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- Improved Customer Loyalty
With how high the competition is and how little information an average customer can get about a company before committing to hiring them, people value trust above all.
When you share advice, resources, and troubleshooting guides, your readers will come to trust your company more. Basically, you’re forming a parasocial relationship with them, and now, your company is more than another random name on a list. It’s a trusted advisor.
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- Reduced Recurring Marketing Spending
It’s true that creating content can cost you a lot of time and money. Whether you’re writing an article yourself or hiring someone, you’ll be diverting resources from other business matters.
Where content marketing excels is at recurring spending. Paid advertising requires you to run ads constantly; otherwise, you will lose the stream of customers.
If your article ranks high on SERP, it’s going to stay there with minimal work on your part and will bring customers almost for free every month.
Best Practices for Field Service-Based Businesses Content Optimization
To get these benefits, you need to do a bit of planning and create content. Here’s where you start.
The first thing you should understand before starting to write a piece is who your customers are. Content should be tailored to the types of people you serve. A thirty-something renter and a sixty-something property owner will have a very different outlook on life, vocabulary, and problems that need fixing. Speaking their language will help build a connection with them.
Many online businesses struggle with this as most customer interactions take place online, and knowing your customers requires using specialized tools and a lot of analytics, guesswork, and experimentation.
As a part of a field service-based business, you have a unique advantage here. You or your employees go out in the field as a part of their jobs and talk to customers. So you should know who typically needs your services, what they like and don’t like, and what they can do with a bit of education on your line of work.
Gather with your employees and try to summarize your experiences with the customers into a customer portrait.
Now for the technical part. You have to optimize your pages for specific keywords, and you have to do some keyword research for that.
Start with a few seed keywords that describe your business or services and run them through keyword research software to find more similar keywords. As FSBs are rarely nationwide corporations, you should also look into local keywords to narrow down the demographic you target.
Then, put the keywords you find into clusters. Group together similar keywords so that one page can target multiple related search terms. This will bring more traffic to a page while keeping it relevant to the user.
Keyword clustering also can hint at whether you need a landing page or a blog post. For instance, these keywords would need a landing page:
- HVAC Cleveland
- Cleveland, OH AC maintenance
- HVAC services
And this cluster would need a blog post:
- Is my AC installed to code
- Ohio building codes
- How to check AC install
You also have to regularly run checks on SERP and competitors to discover more topic ideas and improve your keyword list. For this, you need to put the target keywords into the search bar and analyze the organic results. Such analysis ensures an understanding of the search intent behind the keywords and that your content satisfies users’ requests.
You can move further and use specialized tools like SERP Checker by SE Ranking, which gives a complex overview of the search results with a detailed SEO analysis of competing pages. This way, you’ll have many insights into the competition, the type of pages, and their metrics to make your pages rank higher for the needed keywords.
The first type of content you need to create is service landing pages. The odds are you already have them, and you’ll just need to review search engine optimization practices. Add the main keywords to the most important places to SEO:
- Title tag
- Meta description
- H1 tag
- URL
Add the supporting keywords to other places in the article:
- H2-H4
- Image alt tags
- Sparingly in the body of the text
Don’t forget to add local keywords to the mix.
For service pages, add structured data. It allows you to display additional information in SERP, like pricing, availability, address, images, FAQs, and website links.
To add structured data, you can use Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper or use an AI tool to write the code for you. Make sure it works as intended with the Schema Markup Testing Tool, and add it to the site.
The second type of content you’re going to write is blog articles. In most cases, they won’t bring you clients from the start but will attract people who may be interested in your services. Retain them by asking them to subscribe to a newsletter or to your social media account, and engage them with email marketing down the line.
For field service businesses, content will typically fall into three major categories.
- Guides and tutorials. How to troubleshoot heating system problems.
- Interviews with experts, case studies, and statistics. The most common problems with AC, according to leading technicians.
- Trending and seasonal content. How to prepare concrete surfaces for winter.
You’ll have plenty of content ideas from both keyword research and knowledge of typical problems your customers have. Write about them and optimize for keywords. Blog entries tend to be a bit longer, so feel free to add a few more keywords in the text. But be careful not to overuse them, as with blog posts, it is easier to get penalized because of keyword stuffing.
In content like this, you should also optimize for readability. Write with short paragraphs, use bullet-point lists and images. You can use a tool like the Hemingway App to check your readability score after you’re done.
Link to other content in the article, and if it seems natural in the context, link to your service landing pages.
While this won’t directly help SEO, developing your brand voice will definitely help with content marketing.
Out of the FSB brands that do write a blog, most write in a very similar boring style. If you could develop your unique brand voice, it would immediately help you stand out.
Your brand voice should reflect both who you are and who your customers are. You can go for a smart and professional tone, a humorous tone, or any combination that feels right. If it sounds like you and won’t scare customers off, it’s a good bet.
Blog content on its own won’t convert visitors to customers. You have to nudge them in the right direction with a call to action. The common practice is to include one CTA button on top of the page and one at the bottom of the article.
You can also add CTAs on the side of the article.
Experiment with placement and CTA text to find a formula that works for you.
If you want your content to reach the top ten of Google faster, you’ll need to build links to it. Google determines whether a website is trustworthy by what websites link to it.
Once you get enough great content online, you’ll start earning links passively. But you’ll have to work to get them at first. Here are a few strategies you can use.
- Business association links. If you are a part of an association, their site can link to yours.
- Business directories. Local directories of businesses can provide a free link to your site.
- Guest posting. Reach out to blogs that write about your industry and provide a comment on their recent piece or write an article for them to earn a link.
- Local backlinks. Local websites, especially local news sites, can be a great source of backlinks. Provide comments for articles they’re working on to earn one.
- Link-magnet content. Create long content like a comprehensive guide on something you’re an expert on, and promote it. Others will likely link to it.
Content optimization for field service businesses can become a marketing channel that requires little spending and brings more than just a stable stream of clients to the business. It brings recognition and customer trust even before you go out to work with them.
To create a robust content strategy, learn your clients’ typical problems, do keyword analysis, and create helpful content pieces. Keep creating optimized content and building links, and in a few months, you’ll see the first customers convert from this channel.
