1- Evaluate where your current leads are coming from.

If you’re in home services, it’s easy to track down what the common areas are that you are serving since you kinda need the client’s home address to provide the service. 

Sit down with a spreadsheet, and organize the sheet with the towns in alphabetical order. See anything interesting? 

Let’s say you’re a handyman located in Greenwood, Indiana and all of your leads are 35-50 miles away. You’re not getting any leads in the heavily populated area where your shop resides. You clearly need to figure out the secret sauce in getting quality leads closer to your starting point. 

2- Hone in on the 20-mile radius of your shop.

I’m going to drop some secrets in these next few steps. Maybe you know them, maybe they’re new. So get out your notepad and favorite pen (we all know it’s a Bic-branded pen). 

Note what areas are within the 20 miles. Going with the Greenwood example, you might want to target Whiteland, Franklin, and Southport. Have your website developer put together location pages. These are new pages, not found in your navigation menu but are buried in your site. They have location-specific language such as “Franklin’s Preferred Handyman Services” or “Handyman Services in Whiteland” so that when someone is in Whiteland and Google “Handyman services Whiteland,” guess what? You’d show up. The key to these is hitting the word count per page, add some testimonials, give some before and after images, briefly explain your services, and add buttons to learn more about you and your services. 

Add “Proudly Serving the Franklin, Greenwood, Whiteland, and Southport areas since 1989!” to your homepage. Let people know you’ve been around the block a while and what areas you typically cover. 

3- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

This is a monster. There are a lot of avenues that SEO goes into so we are going to keep it relatively brief here.

Make sure you’re hitting the word count of at least 1,500 for the content on your page to be well-optimized. 

Add alt-tags to ALL images on your website. What the hell is this? It’s more than naming the files. It’s filling out the alternative (alt) text to convey the “why” of each image on your website. This might be pointless to the random Joe scrolling your website, but it is an added resource for Google and other browsers to use when trying to put you in front of those searching for your services. 

4- Ask For Reviews (and maintain your GMB page!)

We mean more than just keeping track of how your technicians are performing on the job without your supervision. 

The most efficient way to go about this is an email that goes to the homeowner’s email inbox or a text message that goes to their phone and has a link to your Google Business Profile (GMB) the day after the service is completed. The more reviews you have on your GMB, the more credibility you have. It also shows Google that you mean business and people like you so you’ll show up with all those pretty stars next to your company’s name. 

You can then add a plug-in that has a carousel of your 5-star reviews that rotates live on your website. We love showing off your team’s job well done!

5- GA4, Google Search Console, ETC

Google… Google is so big, it’s become a verb in our everyday language. Google this, Google that. They have so many resources to help business owners however they are tedious and require a lot of time to learn if you are not familiar with them. 

Google Analytics 4 (GA4) gives you probably waaaay too much info on the people that interact with your website, but don’t ignore that information. The details that GA4 gives you help to know your audience better. 

Google Search Console is a free service offered by Google that helps you monitor, maintain, and troubleshoot your site’s presence in Google Search results. 

6- Paid Ads

There are a slew of platforms you can throw your money at to run an ad, but the goal here is to not just throw the money at the wall and hope it sticks. Have a detailed plan. 

Google offers many helpful tutorials to guide you in the Ads. Google world. However, you don’t need to invest money into ALL of them. In my experience, Performance Max does not reach as many people as Display Ads or Search Ads separately. You may also be a home service provider, but there is not a category fit for you on Google Guaranteed. I will always recommend testing Google Display or Google Search ads first before anything.

Facebook is a HUGE one. There are so many filters you can add to your Facebook ads to reach the type of client you’re looking for. Then you can track the clicks, cost per click, frequency, reach, and impressions month to month. If it’s starting to fall flat or be stagnant, it’s time to shake up your content but the rule of thumb is it takes 3 months to fully optimize your ad. 

Here’s a secret, most agencies hide the cost-per-click on your ads. They expect you to do the math or else it’s out of sight, out of mind and you won’t pay attention to that number. Always always either do the math or request the cost-per-click (CPC) be included in your live dashboard.

7- Did we say 6? Let’s add your obvious 7th option! CALL US!

To be honest, there are way more items on the list to own your service area than just these 7. But many of them are very cumbersome and your eyes would glaze over if I tried to explain them. 

I would love to hop on the phone or meet you for lunch to learn more about your company’s specific roadblocks and help put the plan together to help you own your service area.