News From Kitchen and Bath Industry
We’re going to focus on SEO, which is a really important part of it. Bill Darcy, National Kitchen and Bath Association CEO, was on Fox Business, and he talked about the increased demand in our industry. The reporter was asking about the home sales because they’re going up, and she was asking how it related to the Kitchen and Bath industry. Bill Darcy was really optimistic, and he was saying that they experienced an increase in demand. We can own our nationwide campaigns. We have clients from all across the United States, and we can see that increased demand as well. We can tell the difference between the states that have fully opened and the states that have kind of reopened. But overall, when you look at the whole country you can see that optimistic picture in front of us and the news media giving us some bad news recently, such as increased numbers in some states. In our industry, we’re doing pretty well, and that search will continue, which makes us happy.
Major Google Algorithm Changes
This is one of the mistakes that business owners make. They only think of the desktop version of their website, but they also have a mobile version of their website. Your mobile version is as important as your desktop version. Think about your social media channels, such as your Facebook or Instagram channels. Instagram is something mobile and has nothing to do with your desktop. When people go to your website or Instagram, they will see your mobile page. What we see is almost 55% of the overall traffic for all of our websites is mobile right now. It’s not on a desktop but rather on mobile devices. That’s why it shows us that the mobile website has to be fast and optimized. Then we need to include those mobile websites when you’re rethinking our SEO practices.
- Spem
- Hummingbird
- Pigeon
- Mobile
- Fred
The latest update is Bert’s update. There are around 10s of different updates that Google announced. Sometimes they don’t even announce them. Yet, the tools that we are using help us to understand the changes because then we see fluctuations on our search engine result pages. We can search those results pages when you fluctuate. We can understand there is some change in them. We know that either Google announced another change or different tools that we will be able to understand what’s going on. Google is not going to stop changing this algorithm to give its users a better experience.
Does SEO Still Matter in Kitchen and Bath Marketing?
The question is, does this still matter when you just perform a quick search, even on your desktop or on your mobile phone? First, Google will give you pay-per-click results right in the first area. These are people who are paying their marketing dollars to be ranked on the top of the page and right at the bottom of that area too. You will see Google Maps, Google My Business session, and the organic side right below the map section, especially when you’re talking about your mobile phone. Then you just type something on your mobile phone and you need to go to the bottom of the page to see the organic searches. Do you think it still matters? For example, to check, you can put the Sunshine State, and you will see the top 4 are the pay-per-click results. Then we can see the map areas that vary so we can list our phone number and reviews as well. Then there is the third section at the bottom of the page right before the very bottom. Do you think that this whole thing matters? Think about yourself and think about separating your home service from a business or your own business. Think about another home service business like plumbing services that you’re looking for to use. What would you do? Would you prefer to go and click on the Ad section at the top of the page? Or would you just prefer the map section or the organic section?
If we are looking at a restaurant, like a home service, first, we check the Google Map section, and then we will check the next area. We check the mapping organic section, and some results are going to be in the pay-per-click area. Because this is the main area that Google makes its money from. That’s because 80% of Google profits come through Google ads, so that’s why Google needs to list those leads on the top of the page. When we look at the numbers 67% to 70% of the first five listings are still getting clicks on that area. It shows us it still matters that we still keep SEO strategies in place to be ranked. We cannot rely on just pay-per-click itself or any kind of Google ads or even a pay-per-click system. We definitely need SEO strategies in place.
On-Page SEO & Off-Page SEO
There are two parts of SEO; on-page SEO and off-page SEO. When you’re talking about on-page SEO, we talk about unique content and keyword optimization. You’re going to talk about your own business, and you’re going to talk about your own keywords. It’s important to have keywords to be ranked by the Google crawlers. Also images, you can add a lot of images to your website. But Google or any other kind of search engine cannot see those images, so you need to label those images. Those labels are important when helping those search crawlers to understand what your images are about. Also, page speed is important. Especially after 2018, it became really important with the new algorithm changes. Those four things are the most important things for the on-page SEO. How about off-page? When you go off-page link building, you can reach your fellow industry partners. That way, you can ask them to give you a link from their websites, and even you can reach some bloggers. That’s why influencer marketers are becoming important because they take the product you’re trying to sell and advertise it to their organic audience, which is going to increase their popularity. Blogging links aren’t going to increase popularity, and social media is the least important metric. If you’re talking about the three of them, 95% will be link-building post blogging, but 5% is social media. At some level, the web is free and easy to reach, and you can distinctly say that it is not going to work in your favor anymore. Because imagine a business ten times smaller than you, those people can create ten times more content compared to yours. Yet, Google doesn’t recognize that content as an authoritative metric. That might help if you have a referral client, let’s say if you’re a supermarket, or you have a beauty salon, and you need to share something with those people. You need to share that expertise with your people the next time to bring those people back to you. But in our industry, if you’re spending your time on Facebook, and Instagram by creating new content every day just to get likes will not work. If you have any kind of positive results, that’s really good. But those people are looking for your marketing dollars. If you spend more, they will put you up there. When you look at an SEO practice, putting a lot of social media posts and linking your social media posts to your website is going to help at some level, but it’s not going to bring a big change.
Getting a little more in detail; you need a:
- Strong website,
- Good content,
- Improved user experience.
You need to leverage that multimedia to improve on-page time. If you’re offering a design service or different countertop and cabinet makers, you need to create a page for those. No one can know better than you. If you have a new project that has been done, sit down and provide tips for your experience. Use relevant keywords while you are talking about the experience. You don’t need to pay attention to any kind of detail just because you are the expert. You know what’s going to happen, what happened, and you will just put that into writing. You don’t need anyone else to help. Create that finished project and portfolio type of products and as your city pages and products.
City Page Strategy
We already mentioned, unique content for every page, use the main keyword if you’re a cabinet dealer. You can include your cabinet makers that you carry or, If you’re a countertop company, you need to put that countertop brand such as; quartz or granite as your title tags, and H1 tags. There are a lot of technical details. H1 tags are also something important. Another thing that we consider as an important metric is when you’re running your SEO campaigns you should put your name, address, and phone number in the footer. Google checks those pages if you put that on a footer. What that means is you will have your name, address, and phone number on your pages. Google likes those things because people need to reach you. They need to find your name, address, and phone number on the footer. This is a simple practice, but sometimes it’s missing. To give you a heads up for that blog, we don’t do any updates. Blogging is still important when it comes to how often you need to do it based on our experience. It can be one blog post every month, and one city page every month. You can schedule your city page every 15th, and you can schedule your blog post every 30 days. In this way, you will increase the number of city pages that you have. You will also increase the number of quality blog content that you have on your website. That’s going to help you to send quality signals to Google.
Citations are important also. Let’s say if you have a Facebook page, it’s one citation. Yelp page is one citation, and Houzz page is another citation. The number of citations is there like votes. If they have more votes in the area, it increases the popularity of your website. Creating those citations is where you can’t know what citation website is important for you. We use Bright Local, which are different citation pages like Yext.com. You can see the most important citations that you need to put your website there. Of course, it’s the same name, address, and phone number, and it has to match with every other citation that you’re building. You will see that if you start building these citations that it’s an ongoing effort when you’re doing SEO campaigns. We build self-citations every month, and when you build citations you increase the total loads that are just coming back to your website.
The New 2021 SEO Formula for Kitchen and Bath Industry
There are authoritative links back to your website from other websites. That’s really crucial, you can easily target your cabinet makers or manufacturers’ websites. It is the same thing for these people to mention you, and for you to exchange those links. You’ll see that it’s going to work in your favor. As a quick overall, you need to set up a great website with pages, each of your services, and cities that you need to list your keywords in Google modifiers. The city names and the kind of geo modifiers in the title of each page are important. You need to use unique content for every page. You need multimedia content to help increase the on-page time and reduce the bounce rate. Also, online reviews and citation building is a part of it. If you see good ranking keywords on your webmaster tools, you can leverage paid search, and it works the other way as well. When you start a piece search, you can see what the people are putting on their search bar to look for your products or services. Then you can target those keywords as organic blog posts and your city pages, and target your pay per click. You can get the numbers and implement them in your organic SEO campaigns. There are two ways that are going to work as well.
Online Marketing Ecosystem
When you’re looking at your online marketing as a whole, there are eight different steps.
- SEO
- Pay Per Click
- Retargeting
- Paid Online Directories
- Repeat & Referral
- Pay Per Lead
- Media
- Marketing Outomation Programs
Starting with SEO, Pay Per Click (PPC), retargeting is a part of it. Also, there are different channels, paid online directories, your repeat and referral clients. People use lead sites like Homeadvisor, and Thumbtack. Your social media channels are also a part of it. Last but not least, a marketing automation system that helps you to take all these leads, and systematize and classify all these leads and trigger some emails and text messages to those people without even touching anything automating. That system is an important part because you’re getting some leads from your website, and right away, you may send them an email, or you may give them a call, but after a second call or second email, those people may fall to the cracks, or you don’t even remember what that lead was contacting you about in the first place. Those systems help us to understand and you give them the exact footprint. The exact timeline of their behavior in the system that we can see where these people come from. What that means is these systems are as important as other steps. Your business is in the middle of those steps that you need to differentiate your marketing strategy or online marketing strategy as a whole.