How to Get Started
First, what is SEO? 
Most people think they know what it is because it’s such a common term, but let’s make sure. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. A Search Engine is an “engine for search.” Google, Yahoo, Duck Duck Go are examples of Search Engines. You search, it finds the result for you. Search Engine Optimization is “optimizing” your website and its related properties, such as Google Maps, for the Search Engines. The result is that you show up high in the Google Searches for when people look for you, thereby generating what you need, new leads. If you’re not high up, you don’t get the leads.
This is different than buying water, mold and fire leads, those are generated by your lead generation company buying Pay-Per-Click Ads (the ads at the top of Google) and then sending the calls to you.
The principles in this guide will give you a good idea of how SEO is used for you to manage your water damage marketing program.
If you have not yet, go read our article on How to Get More Water Damage Jobs and the pros and cons to each.
Let’s take this step by step.
Why Your Website’s High Rankings On Search Engines Is More Important Now Than Ever Before
Phone books are dead. Google IS the new phone book. Google gets upwards of 97% of ALL internet searches. Your customers are also doing all of these searches on their iPhones, Google Maps, etc. If you’re not there, this would be like not listing yourself in the phone book 25 years ago.
For water restoration companies, one of the first things people do during water damage emergency is search for something like “water damage restoration company Boston.” If you’re not there, all of those calls go to your competitors.
Is It Worth The Money?
In short, yes – absolutely. You make way more than you spend on Water Damage SEO The return on investment (ROI) for it excellent. Would you spend $100 to make $500? Of course you would. Well that’s a 5X ROI. We get figures of anywhere from that to 5x to over 50x ROI. Some of your day-to-day jobs out there are say $3500, but just one big job can pay for your SEO for years, just on the profits of that one job. Most of the dominant restoration companies have SEO as one of their primary strategies for new business.
This can all become very complicated very quickly as this specialty gets more and more difficult every year. If you do not have the manpower and skill create and maintain an SEO strategy yourself, you should really consider hiring a company to do it for you.
You also must realize the importance of the top 3 positions in Google and Google Maps – Almost ALL of the calls and leads you’ll get form Google come from the top 3 positions. Positions 4 and 5 may get some, if you’re lucky.
SEO leads also close at a much higher rate than Leads coming from Pay-Per-Click marketing. People generally trust Google listings more than Google ads. Ask yourself, “How often do I click on the ads?” Not often is surely your answer. No one is really searching water damage related terms unless they have a situation, so even low search volumes can translate into high converting calls from your website – because they are on point. Focusing only on website traffic is pretty amateur in this space, often when restoration company’s site is well optimized, traffic goes down, but phone calls go up.
What are the Other Benefits of Water Damage Restoration SEO?
Aside from new business and leads, Branding is another benefit to SEO.
When you search for anything and you see the same company coming up at the top over and over, you start to become familiar to your customer. Your customer thinks, “Oh, these guys are real/stable/reliable” or whatever other thoughts that Brand recognition creates. This is how market dominance starts to be created.
How Do I Get Started?
Well, it all starts with good organic strategy. No matter how good your SEO tactics may be, if your strategy is off, you won’t get new leads
What is Considered a Good Search Engine Optimization Strategy for Restoration Companies?
Well, it has to be optimized for what YOUR customers are looking for. This industry is different than most others, it is an emergency service. Less time is spent reading when your basement is filling up with sewage than if you’re shopping for a bathroom remodel, for example. So it has to be understood, and FAST. It also has to be consistent, one of the biggest killers of an SEO program is fast-change SEO.
Keyword Research for your Audience
What do your customers search for? If you think it’s “water mitigation”, you’re wrong. That’s how you talk, not them. Optimizing for industry terms is not how the layman, the housewife, searches for you. Your optimization strategy has to account for this. You need to go after what they say, not what you say. All aspects of the strategy should follow along with this.
Google Suggest (the words that Google suggest to you as you’re typing a search into Google) helps your audience to direct them to proper search terms sometimes, but some do not pay attention to that and will still likely do something simple such as “Water removal company in Chicago” or “Basement water damage repair company Tampa.”
Now, let’s examine how one single keyword moves into many searches:
Water Damage Keywords
One water damage keyword could filter into literally hundreds of searches. For example, “Water Damage Dryout Restoration Service in Tampa” could be searched as:
- Tampa company to dryout water damage
- Dryout water damage in basement Tampa
- Water damage service restore basement Tampa
- Repair water damage in basement Tampa
- Water Damage company Near me
The number of searches coming from that ONE keywords could be hundreds over time in many, many different alterations.
Looking at Your Competitor’s SEO
You can see many things by looking at your competitor’s SEO. But probably the most valuable thing is how they are creating their webpages to allow customers fast and understandable things that they want to see, right away, in order to convert that customer into a phone call.
However, it can be unproductive if you think that they are definitely getting phone calls. You don’t know this. You could rank high for the wrong term, or have aspects of the of the website that actually turn away clients. There’s many factors that could be good or bad, so you don’t want to overdo copying other people’s programs. Also it may undermine the originality of what you do and why what you do works for getting new customers.
Understanding Local SEO for Water Damage Restoration Companies, the Google “3 pack”
The Google 3 pack (top three listings known by you probably as just Google maps, which is also been called Google my business among several other terms over the years) is an excellent source of leads and phone calls. However, unless you are in the top three positions in Google Maps you will not get the calls. Also keep in mind that when people are searching on a mobile device there are mobile apps specifically for this and those three positions show up right at the top. If you do any local water damage restoration company search in Google you will notice that they give this a preferential position, right below the ads. This is an imperative part of any water damage restoration SEO strategy.
Reputation and Reviews
Now something to know here, is that no matter how good your SEO strategy is in both organic rankings and in Google maps, if you do not have good reviews, or you have no reviews, no amount of good SEO will bypass that. People look at this stuff. Your reputation is valuable online. Think about when you do an Amazon search for a product, what’s the first thing you look at? You look at their reviews. You mostly judge your purchase decision based off of the reviews of other reviews. People will search Google for your reputation and they will look at your reviews and if you don’t spend the time on this, you cannot blame SEO for “not working.” If your rankings are high but your reputation is bad, you WON’T get leads. Click here to read how to recover from bad Google reviews.
What is Organic SEO for Water Damage Restoration Services?
Organic SEO is a term that you will hear often. All “organic” means is that you are showing up in the “natural” results of Google. You will be below the advertisements and below the Google Maps listings. People call these the natural or organic results.
Content and Optimization
Content marketing and optimization is another thing that you will hear commonly. As with any SEO tactic, If done incorrectly it can actually damage your SEO. For example, if you have a board-up service as part of your offerings, you don’t want to have tons of content on that page telling about mold remediation or other potentially disrelated terms. Google definitely relates terms to content and your content should match what you are trying to get that page to rank for.
Also people will post blog posts around the Internet for “content marketing” and and then point a link from that article back to the website. Now, this can be effective, if done correctly. However, over the last few years Google has actually been penalizing people for posting links back to their website from bad quality blog websites. One of these is called a PBN which stands for “Private Blog Network.” These are networks of blogs that are linked together and they point back to your site, these do a LOT of damage to peoples programs, especially since last June’s Google updates.
Link Building For Your Water Damage Restoration Company
Link building is another important subject, and also a very misunderstood subject. The days of just adding links pointing back to your website are over. If you were asking yourself, “how many links are you sending to my website? “This often is a very unproductive question. The only links that really matter that are sent back to your websites these days are sent from reputable sources. For example if you have a link coming from the Better Business Bureau‘s website, then that would be considered a quality back link. however, if you write an article that is a low quality article and post it on a low quality blog website that has tons of different articles that aren’t related to the industry and then point that back to your website? The result can actually be very damaging.
About Our Water Damage SEO Services
If you’re frustrated and you don’t have the manpower, time, or facilities to do it yourself, we can help.
Founder, Dan York, speaking at the AIR Water Damage Restoration Conference
Water damage SEO should be one of your top digital strategies that you are executing. It’s far less expensive than doing PPC, social media marketing or many other sources of marketing that you do, but it produces some of the highest quality leads (remember, they are looking for you and if they find you, that is somebody typically with a real problem).
We’ve been doing this for way over a decade, we know every player in this industry, we actually know what the IICRC is, we’re at the trade shows, we are AIR members and have worked with well over 1000 restoration companies in the United States alone. We’ve long been the leaders in this space. Our technology and techniques are unmatched as is our customer service. We have clients that have been with us for over a decade. Most of our clients that we take on have been with three or four companies and they stop with us. And all of our SEO programs are custom made for you.