Handyman SEO: How to Do It, What to Avoid, Tools & More

What is Handyman SEO?

Handyman SEO is a digital marketing strategy that improves a website's ranking on search engine results pages (SERPs) for handyman-related search queries and keywords.

Handyman SEO encompasses keyword research, content optimization, backlink and citation building, content marketing strategies, and local SEO techniques.

Implementing these SEO strategies can help your website rank higher on search engines like Google and Bing, bringing in more website traffic and, in turn, contributing to more job bookings and revenue.

Why is SEO Important for Handyman Contractors?

SEO is an essential digital marketing strategy for handyman contractors, offering many benefits. 

Some key benefits include:

1. Cost-effective: SEO strategies can be implemented relatively cheaply compared to other marketing methods. For example, a billboard in a large city can cost $14,000 a month, while SEO can cost between $1,250 and $6,250 per month, or $15,000 to $75,000 per year.

2. Wide audience: Google sites boast around 280 million unique visitors monthly in the United States. Ensuring your website ranks well on Google and other search engines lets you tap into this broad audience. 

Furthermore, executing SEO correctly means your business can rank for keywords directly related to your business and services. People who search those keywords are qualified leads.

3. Improved click-through rate (CTR): According to in-depth research by Backlinko, the average CTR for websites ranked #1 in Google’s organic (unpaid) SERP is 27.6%. Moving up one rank in the SERP increases CTR by 2.8%, on average, but it depends on where you move from and to.

Simply put, the higher you rank, the better your CTR.

4. Enhanced brand awareness and perception: Appearing frequently in search results positions you as an authority in your industry, and a well-implemented SEO strategy can help you achieve this. 

Potential customers who see your business as credible and authoritative are more likely to consider working with you.

5. Better user experience: A bad user experience (UX) means visitors will spend less time on your website, increasing your bounce rate. Google considers this a failure to meet visitors' needs. 

Users may bounce because of slow page loading, poor accessibility, or difficult-to-navigate pages. Google’s algorithm considers these factors to assess and index your website.

Improving these website elements will help Google index your pages correctly, increase your ranking chances, and provide an excellent UX.

How Can You Do SEO for Your Handyman Business?

Successfully implementing SEO on your website involves several sub-strategies. 

Let’s look into each of them in detail.

1. Invest in local SEO

Local SEO is an SEO strategy tailored to local services businesses. It is a niche SEO strategy that targets local search terms, such as “handyman near me” or “handyman services Richmond.”

Local SEO is crucial as it helps your business bring in high-quality leads in your service area.

A key feature of local SERPs on Google is the Map Pack, which features three businesses that closely match the local search query. Here’s an example of what the Map Pack looks like for the “handyman services Richmond” query:

The Map Pack shows more information about the featured businesses, such as their star rating, number of reviews, a review snippet, business hours, links to their website, directions, and contact information. It also shows a map with the businesses’ locations pinpointed on it.

Local SEO is part of an organic SEO strategy. Google also offers a paid advertising solution called Local Services Ads (LSAs) that targets local search queries. These ads appear at the top of the search results and contain information similar to the Map Pack.

LSAs can boost credibility as businesses are required to pass a Google check before their ads are listed. This means LSAs contain a Google Guarantee badge that enhances trust with potential customers. 

Pro tip: ServiceTitan’s Local Services Ads feature lets customers book jobs directly from your LSAs. The client’s information is automatically imported into the ServiceTitan dashboard, saving your office team time and reducing human error in duplicated data from manual entry.

The Google algorithm decides which businesses appear in the Map Pack for each local search query. You can improve your chances of appearing by following some essential best practices. Let’s look at the main ones to implement in more depth.

Create and optimize your Google Business Profile

Google Business Profile (GBP), formerly Google My Business, is a platform for businesses where you can claim a free business listing and control how your business is shown on Google’s products, including local SEO and LSAs.

Once you’ve claimed your business listing, you should optimize it by:

• Including your company’s details, such as the location, opening hours, and phone number

• Adding high-quality images and videos of your work

• Regularly updating the included details to retain accuracy

Boost visibility with reviews

Gathering reviews on Google is vital for increasing brand visibility, helping potential customers learn more about you, and building trust. Gaining positive reviews reflects well on your business and improves your chances of appearing in local search results.

Furthermore, 75 percent of customers read reviews when looking for a local business, so it’s worth getting your happy clients to help sell your services to prospects.

It’s best to request a review after a job is completed and your five-star service is fresh in the client’s mind. ServiceTitan’s Reputation Management feature lets you automate the review-request process so that your business automatically sends a review request to every client when a job is completed. 

Additionally, you can monitor and respond to reviews from multiple platforms all in one place, improving brand perception.

Build citations

A citation is an online mention of your handyman business on different websites, such as directories (Angi, HomeAdvisor), review sites (Yelp), and social media platforms (Facebook, Instagram). Usually, they include your business’s name, address, and phone number (NAP). 

You can build citations by claiming local business listings in directories and other top lead-generation websites and ensuring your NAP is consistent and accurate across every citation.

While manually updating your business listings is possible, it is tedious and time-consuming. Instead, use ServiceTitan’s Reputation Management feature to manage your listings and update them all at once. 

Optimize your handyman website for local searches

Google uses the information on your website to learn about your business and determine your fit for local search results. To ensure you appear in the right searches, you can implement the following best practices:

• Create a designated page for each location you serve and your services, targeting one specific keyword per page.

• Your homepage should include all your business information (service area, phone number, location). Create an About page with other essential business information. You can also embed a Google map with a pin showing your location.

• Implement basic SEO principles, such as on-page SEO, and avoid black hat SEO practices (more on both of these later).

2. Conduct keyword research

Keyword research involves sourcing relevant words and phrases people use to find your business (and others like it) online.

Using the right keywords across your handyman website can help search engines determine what your website is about and improve your SERP rankings.

You should include handyman keywords (meaning search terms that contain the word ‘handyman’) on your website. There are two quick, easy, and free ways to find these keywords for your website. Firstly, you can use Google autocomplete and related searches, as in the example below:

When you start typing your handyman search term, Google will automatically display other related search terms you can use as keywords.

The second option is to use related searches at the bottom of the SERP.

These methods can help you quickly find keywords to add to your website, but it’s worth using specialized SEO tools like Semrush or Ahrefs to look up key metrics like search volume and intent. These tools also offer competitor analysis tools so you can see the keywords they rank for.

3. Implement on-page SEO

On-page SEO refers to web page optimization methods that help your website attract organic traffic and rank well on the SERP. There are several elements of every web page you should optimize, including:

• Meta descriptions

• URL structure

• Headings and page structure

• Internal links

Let’s look into each of them.

Meta descriptions

Meta descriptions are code snippets that describe what a page is about. They appear under the clickable title for every link on the SERP:

Meta descriptions provide an opportunity to briefly summarize your page and persuade searchers to click on your link. Search engines use them to understand your page’s theme and how it should be ranked with the other results in the SERP.

To optimize your meta descriptions, follow these best practices:

• Ensure they accurately reflect your page’s content.

• Keep them between 50 and 160 characters.

• Create unique meta descriptions for each page on your handyman company’s website.

• Include the page’s target keyword in the meta description.

URL structure

To make your URLs SEO-friendly, make them descriptive and include relevant keywords related to the page. This will give Google more context about your page and contribute to your search ranking.

If your page is performing well on the SERP, you must not change the URL, as doing so will cause Google to treat it as a new page and re-rank it.

Headings and page structure

Defining a content hierarchy using headings and subheadings makes it easier for Google (and your readers) to understand the flow of content on your page. Google also uses headings to assess how well your content satisfies the keyword’s search intent.

Your title is your main heading and should be an H1. Then, use H2s for each subtopic within your content and H3s to H6s to explain further, as needed. Look at how the content in this article is split up as an example.

Include variations of your primary keyword in your content headings to improve your chances of ranking.

Internal links

Every page on your website should have hyperlinks to other pages on the same website. To ensure there are no orphan pages, it’s important to develop a linking strategy that links new pages to existing ones and from existing pages to your new content.

These links help Google find other pages of your website, understand its structure, and establish how different pages relate. Furthermore, internal links let visitors easily navigate to various pages on your site, increasing the time spent on your website and telling Google that they find the information valuable, which helps you rank higher.

They also provide opportunities to send traffic further down your content funnel.

Two key internal linking best practices to implement are:

• Ensure every page has a link from and to at least one other page on your website so it can be found, crawled, and indexed.

• Use anchor text related to the page the link leads to so users know what to expect.

4. Develop a content strategy

An SEO content strategy will form the basis of your content-creation efforts. Creating high-quality content about topics and keywords your target audience searches for helps bring new traffic (and customers) to your website.

Here’s how to create a handyman SEO content strategy:

1. Find the right keywords Use the methods mentioned in section two to research potential keywords. A tool like Semrush helps validate the search volume and keyword difficulty so you can opt for keywords that are easy to rank for but have a good enough volume to make them worthwhile.

First, you want around 10-15 keywords to form the base of your content.

2. Research the SERP and competing content

Look through the first page of results for each of your chosen keywords and see what type of content appears there, such as lists or how-to guides. 

Consider this structure when creating your content, and always aim to create better content than what is already out there and ranking.

3. Create content with SEO in mind Next, you can start creating your content. It’s best to start with an outline so you know what to include in each section. Remember to employ SEO best practices in your content, such as:

• Include your primary keyword throughout the text without stuffing it or making the flow unnatural. Remember that you’re writing for the reader, not just Google.

• Add secondary keywords and keyword variations.

• Link to external, authoritative sources like statistics, research, studies, etc.

As handyman businesses operate locally, it’s also important to consider other types of pages that contain localized content. These include:

• NAP footer: Include your name, address, and phone number in the footer of every page on your website. Ensure it matches the details in Google My Business and other directories. 

You can also include the cities or neighborhoods you serve in the footer, but stick to around three to avoid looking spammy.

• Testimonials, case studies, and reviews: As previously mentioned, reviews are vital for building trust as customers search for service providers. You can also use them on your website to rank for local search terms.

Consider asking customers for whom you completed large or complex jobs if they will do a case study for your website. This in-depth review explains their problem, how you solved it, and the results.

• Service pages for different service areas: Create individual service pages for each area you serve and optimize them with the relevant local keywords. 

Lastly, remember that the content from your SEO campaigns isn’t restricted to your website. Establish a distribution and content repurposing strategy, including posting highlights on social media and sending your content to your email list.

ServiceTitan’s Email Marketing features let users create hyper-targeted email lists based on existing customer information so that you can send relevant content to precisely the right group.

Plus, you can use professional-looking email templates to speed up the design process. Simply edit the template to fit your brand, include the content from your article, and schedule it to be sent at the right time.

5. Implement technical SEO

There are two sides to SEO. While optimizing your content for SEO is vital, you must also implement technical SEO to enable Google to find, crawl successfully, and index every page on your website so you can appear and rank in Google search results.

You can perform a technical SEO audit using Semrush, Screaming Frog, Ahrefs, or Sitebulb.

Some key technical SEO elements to consider for your handyman website include:

• Site speed: Slow-loading pages are penalized by the Google algorithm, and they’re also likely to increase your bounce rate as visitors get frustrated and leave your site. 

• Sitemaps and robots.txt: A sitemap lists every page on your website. Robots.txt directs Google’s search bots to the pages they should crawl.

• HTTPS: HTTP is a protocol that transfers data between a web server and a browser. HTTPS is the secure version that encrypts the data and protects sensitive information.

• Mobile-friendliness: Nearly 60 percent of searches are completed on a mobile device, so your website must be mobile-friendly. Use Google’s mobile test tool to check for mobile-friendliness on your website. 

6. Acquire backlinks to your website

Backlinks are links from external websites that take visitors to your website. Quality backlinks from authoritative websites improve your domain authority and can help you rank higher.

Some link-building tactics to include in your strategy include:

• Claim unlinked mentions: Find places where your company is mentioned but not linked to so you can request a link back to your website. You can find unlinked mentions through the SEO tools previously mentioned or by searching your company name on Google.

• Organize special events in your community: Host a DIY home repair workshop, sponsor the local Little League team, or contribute to a community effort. Ensure any news stories or promotional content published online link to your website.

• Local PR: Speak with local publishers, newspapers, and other content creators about a relationship. They can cover events like the one mentioned above, interview you for a local story, or otherwise promote your business and link to your website.

Black Hat SEO Practices Handyman Businesses Should Avoid

Black hat SEO refers to underhand search engine optimization tactics that breach Google’s terms of service.

They can be tempting as they deliver quick results. Still, black hat SEO practices come with significant long-term costs, such as low rankings that hinder online visibility, damage to your online reputation, or a permanent Google ban. These punishments are difficult, if not impossible, to come back from.

Here are some black hat SEO practices to avoid:

• Buying backlinks: Paid backlinks violate the Google terms of service for both parties involved. The search engine discounts any paid links and can ban the website—in part or entirely—from search results.

• Keyword stuffing: Forcing keywords into your website’s content unnaturally or in a spammy way to improve ranking deters readers and can result in a SERP ban.

• Using keywords in your business name in your Google Business Profile: Your business name should be listed correctly in your Google Business Profile. Adding extra keywords not part of your registered business name can lead to Google banning your listing.

SEO Tools Handyman Businesses Can Use

Several SEO tools, like Semrush, Ahrefs, and Screaming Frog, can help handyman businesses get started with SEO. However, many of these tools have limited free plans and can be expensive if you have a small budget.

Here are some other tools you can use for free to help you research keywords and track key performance metrics for your handyman business:

• Google Search Console is a free SEO tool from Google that helps handyman businesses track their website's performance in organic search. It also shows any issues a page may have that hinder its ranking potential and the keywords searchers use to find your website.

• Google Analytics provides reports on traffic, lead acquisition, bounce rate, and other essential website metrics. It can be used to measure your return on investment (ROI).

• Google Keyword Planner is a free tool from Google Ads that helps with keyword discovery and analysis and provides insight into search volumes.

If you plan to run Google Ads alongside your SEO strategy, ServiceTitan’s Home Services Marketing Software will help you gain deeper insights into the success of your campaigns. 

You can add trackable phone numbers to each campaign that lets you accurately monitor ROI and see what job types each ad brings in. You can also access the ServiceTitan heat map to see the areas where your ads are most successful.

Over to You

Search engine optimization is a crucial part of your handyman marketing strategy. The tips and tools in this article can help you develop and grow your handyman business and online presence.

ServiceTitan handyman service software can help you better manage your directory listings, gather more reviews, and distribute SEO content through other channels. The software also offers features that complement SEO to enhance your overall marketing strategy. Click here for a free demo.

ServiceTitan is an all-in-one home services software solution that provides in-depth marketing insights, business management tools, and features that help handyman businesses nationwide manage their online presence. It is trusted by over 100,000 contractors across the country.