8 Easy Steps For Towing Companies To Get More Leads
Do I need SEO for my towing company?
Yes. SEO provides you with a consistent flow of leads for your business, at minimal effort and time expenditure on your part. It has repeatedly been shown to be the most lucrative digital marketing strategy in existence. Best of all – SEO is at it’s most effective when used for local blue collar industries like towing companies. This is because when people search for you they are in need, are showing interest (very warm leads), and they are ready to invest their resources into you and your business. SEO is an incredibly powerful force to passively drive sales to your business, and over the next few minutes we’re going to show you some simple SEO strategies that you can use to start ranking higher, beating your competition, and start to get some leads through your website.
Step 1 – Optimise your towing website for your ‘killer keywords’
Here at Digital Capital Marketing, we like to go after ‘killer keywords’. In case you’re a bit confused, keywords are simply another word for the types of words that people use in Google searches. For example, if your towing company is located in Las Vegas, then a search term they would be very likely to use to search for your business niche would be “towing companies las vegas”.
While there are tools and pieces of software that we can use to help out with this, at this stage it’s not really necessary. You have a business to run, and this guide is all about getting you the best possible results with the least amount of work. For this reason, think of the first thing that someone would type when searching for your companies niche. If you’re a towing company in dallas, then it’ll be something along the lines of “dallas towing company”. I know this sounds simple – and it is – but this is something that people can tend to overthink. Just pick the one term someone would type in when searching for your business in your area.
Quick side note – try and narrow down your location when thinking of what people will type in when searching for you. Using the previous example, we’re not trying to compete for keywords like: “towing company texas”. Trying to compete against all of the other towing businesses in the entirety of texas is going to be quite a challenge at this stage. Instead, focus on the town you serve – it’s even better if you can narrow this even further down to a specific suburb. Think about where your highest paying clients usually come from, and consider targeting these specific wealthy areas that are where your best clients are around. As a general rule – the more specific the area, the easier it is to rank and the better the results you will get.
Step 2 – h1 tag
The h1 tag is simply the biggest text on your website. There should only be one h1 tag per website page, and it’s going to be the biggest text on there on your home page, and the text will really stand out on your website. This also just happens to be one of the main sections Google looks at when they’re analysing your website. Because of this, we want to make sure we can show Google *exactly* what your business is, and where it is located.
One not so good thing a lot of people do, especially when designing people build their own websites themselves, is they don’t use the opportunity of the h1 tag. Many people may put their company slogan, or add a review, something along those lines. Instead, we’re going to use the h1 tag in the best way possible. All you need to do here is change your h1 tag to your chosen killer keyword. Going back to the previous example, this means we would just change the h1 tag to ‘dallas towing company’. This still sounds professional, and it not only helps Google to see exactly what your website is about, but it also helps a lot with conversions and getting visitors to reach out to you. One of the most important rules of website design is that the customer should know within the first 5 seconds of visiting:
- Who you are
- What you do
- Where you are
- Why you’re the best
By changing your h1 tag to your killer keyword, you’ve already crossed 3 of those off the list. Visitors instantly know who you are, what your business does, and where you’re located. This gives you a head start of appearing as high value as possible to all website visitors. It’s a great start, and we just did it with less than 2 minutes of work.
Again, if you’re a bit confused on how to find your h1 tag, just type into YouTube ‘how to change h1 tag wordpress/wix/squarespace etc.’ You could do this, or you could reach out to use using the contact form below. We’ll do it completely for free for you – just because you took the time to read this blog post 🙂
Step 3 – title tag
The title tag is simply the text that appears in your websites tab when you are on your website. Not only this, but it is also the biggest blue text that appears in Google searches. Because of this, it is incredibly important that you show your towing company to be of higher value than your competitors in Google searchers, while getting Google to like you as much as possible.
Luckily for us, this is really easy. You just need to change your title tag to your killer keyword, in the same fashion that you changed your h1 tag. Now, because you’ll be appearing in Google search terms with this keyword, you’ll want to add a bit of branding. To make this as simple as possible – if you are a towing company in dallas, then we would recommend changing your title tag to:
Best Towing Company in Dallas | Over 100 5* Reviews! | TowersRUs
Quick tip: Your title tag should be between 55 and 70 characters. The example above has 64 characters, which perfectly falls in between this range.
From Google’s perspective, they can clearly see that you market yourself as one of the best towing companies in dallas, and can see your company name. Google knows exactly who you are, what you do, and where you are. Perfect.
From a prospects perspective, They instantly see you as an authority after you present yourself as one of the best towing companies in dallas. Why are you the best? Well, now they see you have over 100 5* reviews – you must be very competent and valuable with that kind of social proof! Finally, they see your company name, which helps to build trust. I don’t know about you, but I would be very keen to click on someones website if they presented these qualities to me.
Best of all, I bet that most of your competition is not doing anything like this. You’re beating them already!
Step 4 – Speed up your towing company website
When you see this step, 2 thoughts probably pop into your mind:
- Why do I need do speed up my website?
- I’m not very good at this techy stuff – how do I even go about speeding up my website?
First of all, Google themselves has said that a websites loading speed is one of the main factors they look at when deciding where to rank websites. Google is generally very secretive about how they go about ranking websites, so if they’re publicly mentioning one of the main factors they look for when deciding where to place your website, then this is something that is incredibly important. You want to be aiming for your website to load in 3 seconds or less – ideally under 2 seconds. From research this appears to be the gold standard that Google looks form.
If you’re interested to see how fast your website is, you can use Google’s own tool called Google PageSpeed Insights. Just type in your websites URL (www.yourwebsite.com) and click the ‘analyse’ button. Google will then scan your website themselves and will provide you with a detailed report of exactly how speedy your website is.
One of the easiest and fastest ways to speed up your website is by compressing your images. This just means we will be making the images on your website smaller files (meaning they load faster) – the best part is your websites’ images will stay at the same high quality, but will be faster to load. Images are usually some of the largest pieces of media on any website, and because of this they are often one of the main reasons websites are slow.
We use TinyPNG for all of our files. This is a great, free tool that compresses your images in seconds, with no loss of quality from the images themselves – (they look the same before and after, despite being smaller files and faster to load). Simply log into your website builder, grab your image files and put them into TinyPNG. After this, just replace the new, smaller files with the images that are already in your website. If you’re confused about how to go about this, just type into youtube ‘How to change images wordpress/wix/squarespace etc. for a detailed description.
Step 5 – Structure your website appropriately
Chances are your website doesn’t have a large number of pages. This is great news for Google, as it likes to be able to clearly search your website and clearly see the structure. Let’s say you have a home page, an about page, a services page and a contact page. You want the home page to be at the highest priority, and the other 3 pages at a slightly lower priority. This means that when people click on your website from a Google search they will always be shown your home page first, and not your about, services, or contact page.
Quick Tip – Every website should have a structure where to reach the location from any point of the website, it should take no more than 3 clicks. For example if I am on your home page, I should be able to access your contact page in no less than 3 clicks. This is easily achieved by adding a navigation bar at the top of your website.
Step 6 – Check out your competitors
You’ve got a great head start, but now we want to optimise a bit further. Type in your killer keyword and click on all of the businesses on the first page. What are they doing better than you? Do they show more reviews on their home page? What is their USP? From a customers perspective, why would they choose them over you? By answering questions like these you can optimise your website even further to beat out your competitors.
Step 7 – Content Creation
Google likes to see that websites are updated consistently, and with high quality content. This makes a lot of sense – if you’re searching for a business on Google you want to see one that is active! Blog posts are a great option for this, as they clearly show Google that you regularly update your website, and at the same time they bring value to your visitors, driving more traffic to your website as a result.
For best results, you should be aiming to write blog posts that are 2,000+ words. Ideally these should be written once a week, but you can reduce this to once a month if you need to. Now, I understand that writing a 2,000+ word blog post for your business can be quite a bit of a time & effort investment, but this is something that you could easily outsource to an employee..
..or you can choose to pay a professional to do it for you. This not only saves you time, but gets you better results in a faster period of time. Gee..I wonder who you could possibly contact for something like this..
Step 8 – Creating your irresistible offer
Getting people to visit your website is great. Getting people to reach out to you is another thing. One easy method you can use to get ahead of your competition and get more leads is by creating your very own ‘irresistible offer’. This should be an offer that has:
- Value incentive (-20% discount)
- Scarcity (Only 1 week left!)
For example, you could offer something like:
Valentines day special! 20% off all services! Ends in 1 week.
Creating a high value offer such as this incentivises people to contact you far more, as it is a great offer and it is urgent – you are only offering it for 1 week, so they better contact you fast!
Quick tip – You don’t have to only push this offer 1 week of the year. Think of different events on the calendar and create an offer based around it. If your business tends to slow down in winter, then why not create a ‘winter special’? Experiment to find out what gets you the best results.