As an executive in the home improvement industry, your digital home is your company website. Just like any home, you need to implement home improvement search engine optimization (SEO) in your website to ensure it is accessible and appealing to your visitors. Here is a guide for home improvement executives, prepared by LeapOut’s SEO team. What SEO Can Do for Home Improvement Websites? With SEO, you can boost the chances of getting site visibility on Google, Bing or other search engines. LeapOut SEO specialist Jan Fredrick Nietes said that as SEO experts, “we optimize websites so customers can find your products more easily online. The goal is for your website to show up at the top of search engines when people look for things you sell.” Home improvement SEO takes those principles and tailors them to businesses in the home renovation, remodeling, interior design, and other home services sectors. Many customers in this industry start connecting with companies online using Google, making it extremely competitive for SEO. So, if your website isn’t well-optimized, you’re missing out on a huge pool of potential leads. A properly executed SEO strategy will result in: Increase your brand’s online visibility by appearing on the top of Google search pages More qualified traffic coming to your website Establishing your company as a reputable and trustworthy business partner Enhanced lead generation and better sales. How Google Ranks A Home Improvement Website? Before we discuss how SEO will place your home improvement website or your key landing pages on top of Google search pages, let us first find out how the most popular search engine ranks websites. Google ranks websites using a complex algorithm. Algorithm is a decision-making process or set of rules for calculating, decision-making, or other problem-solving tasks. The search giant considers hundreds of factors to determine the criteria by which it ranks your website. As a business keen on maintaining its market dominance, Google sees to it that it provides the best search engine results pages (SERPs) to all users. While no one knows Google’s exact algorithm (it is proprietary and constantly evolving) on achieving this goal, SEO experts found out the search engine pays particular attention to these ranking factors: Meaning Relevance Context Quality Usability How SEO Can Boost Visibility of Home Improvement Sites? With these in mind, SEO experts have summed up these five major ranking factors into three major tasks that they do daily: Create and publish relevant, high-quality content Ensure the web pages provide positive user experience to both humans and search engines Get quality and relevant backlinks Create and Publish High-Quality Content As the web’s de facto librarian and gatekeeper, Google loves showing what it considers as quality content. Top-notch content means it is informative, engaging, and well-written. Google evaluates factors such as the content’s relevance, readability, comprehensiveness, and originality. The LeapOut SEO team has a list of recommendation on how to craft top-notch content for home improvement businesses: Place yourself in your customers’ shoes What questions are they asking? What problems are they Googling solutions for? Create content that answers those directly. Target very specific keywords This industry is highly competitive. To get an edge over your rivals, you need to focus on specific keywords that consumers would be likely to search. To further increase your brand’s competitiveness, you can target: Service-specific keywords – Focus on terms related to specific services (e.g., “roof replacement”, “deck installation”, “countertop refinishing”). So, instead of using “bathroom remodel,” which, despite having a sizable volume of 1,600,000 searches per month, it has a competitive keyword difficulty (KD) of 69. Compare this to a more focused “small bathroom remodel ideas,” which, despite having a decent volume of an estimated 10,000 searches per month, has an extremely low keyword difficulty. Targeting “small bathroom remodel ideas” would be easier for your content to rank than “bathroom remodel.” Hyper-local – Joyce Roque, LeapOut SEO Specialist focusing on on-page and local SEO, encourages the use of location-based keywords, such as the name of the city and your target term like “interior cement board paint in Manila,” “small bathroom remodeling Philippines,” or “bathroom renovations Manila”. Hyper-local keywords with location modifiers will make your company visible to your target customers in your service area. Long-tail keywords – Find lower-competition phrases with high intent like “best materials for kitchen backsplash on a budget”. Problem-solving keywords – Focus on searches that address common home improvement pain points such as “how to fix a leaky faucet” and “small bathroom remodel ideas” to directly address the concerns of your customers. Match search intent with the right content Google aims to understand the intent behind a user’s search query and provide relevant results that match that intent. Pages that effectively address user intent through content and context are more likely to rank higher. For example, if you search for “roof repair,” Google assumes you are finding tips on how to fix your damaged roof. Meanwhile, if you key in “roof repair Manila” the search engine will give you a list of companies that offer the service within Manila. So, if you wish to target “roof repair,” you need to publish interesting, engaging, and entertaining listicles to improve the visibility of your company for this keyword. As for “roof repair Manila,” you need to optimize your service pages or landing pages to make it rank for this keyword. It is then an SEO professional’s job to suggest writers or publishers what types of content to produce for this keyword. “At LeapOut, we analyze user intent by identifying what they are particularly searching for through the use of keywords in the content,” according to our SEO specialist Joyce Roque. Ensure the pages are formatted properly Google gives importance to the structure and layout of the content for better reading experience to the reader. Breaking down a blog post into sections and using well-written meta descriptions and headers makes it easy for Google and humans to figure out what the section and text is all about.