Apart from employees and equipment, your brand is the most important company asset. Effective branding separates fledgling companies from industry champions. Despite this, thousands of plumbing contractors continue to neglect branded SEO online. Below, Jason and Nolen discuss how to unlock your brand’s potential in organic search. They’ll also point out some disastrous mistakes that hurt local businesses.

If you desire stronger online lead generation, be sure to listen closely!

Pro Tips for Plumbing Contractors

* Never abandon an established brand name or URL, unless you absolutely have to.

* Treat your digital brand with the same respect as you would your physical brand.

* Don’t try to “game the system” using your GMB account. It could cost you!

* Negative reviews lose their impact when surrounded by a host of positive feedback.

* Make sure your website is optimized for local search.

What is Branded SEO?

Branded SEO refers to optimizing your online assets in a way that makes your brand more recognizable and trusted by Google. Just like developing trust with someone takes time and effort, so does establishing your trustworthiness with the world’s most popular search engine. As you prove your company’s reliability, local search rankings almost always rise as a result. 

Why Trust Matters

Google Search strives to provide finely tuned results for all of its user base. If you want to buy tickets to a football game or purchase a gift for a family member, the search engine wants to make sure the results you see not only match the keywords you typed but that they bring you much closer to your desired service/product. If they believe a website won’t provide dependable results, that site will never see page one rankings!

In other words, Google needs to know that you’ll provide the quality services you claim to. Any plumbing company can say they provide “professional water heater repair in San Antonio, TX”, but only a handful get listed. How do these businesses achieve such fantastic success? Let’s break down that process.

Strategy for Successful Branded SEO

Complete Your GMB Listing

Everything starts with your online company listing! Google My Business (GMB) provides a free, convenient way to get your plumbing business listed. Without claiming and completely filling out this profile, it’s almost impossible to achieve top rankings in local search. Then again, businesses that take full advantage of GMB tend to enjoy higher rank and website traffic! If you haven’t already, make sure your business listing has been claimed and finished.

Again, it’s free and from Google. That alone makes GMB worth the minimal time investment! Just make sure that the address you register with Google is the same one you use for all your other citation sources (such as Yelp and BBB), and vice versa. Even differences in abbreviation can make Google suspicious.

Optimize Your Website

We could spend hours talking about what makes a website appear more trustworthy to Google. The company website is an integral part of branded SEO. Google Search regularly combs through your site, searching for new pages and content. If its crawlers (bots used to examine a site) discover these elements, it’s much more likely to judge your company favorably.

* Service Pages

* A Company Blog

* Clearly Visible Branding (Logo, Contact Info, Etc.)

* A Sitemap

* Applicable Keyword Usage

* Professional Content Formatting

* Optimized Imagery

* Schema Coding