Love it or hate it, Google dominates online — both organically and across its paid advertising platforms. It’s an important platform your window and door marketing effort needs to be built around.
The sheer volume of traffic that Google can drive to your window and door business cannot be matched by other platforms. While Facebook has a large number of users, when a local customer is looking to purchase new doors and windows they are going straight to Google.
Service businesses have endless growth opportunities available to them on Google. Aside from the organic search traffic opportunity and pay-per-click traffic, Google offers several additional marketing tools that are available to you free of charge, which can also help you grow your business.
It’s important that you know what is available and how each contributes to the success of your window and door marketing. These Google marketing tools are worth exploring — they all play a key role in the success of your replacement door marketing and replacement window advertising.
Google Ads
When we initially speak to most window and door companies they are all excited about search engine optimization. For some reason many business owners associate SEO with “free” traffic, but that is not the case at all. SEO takes time, as well as a lot of money, to reach the level of consistent traffic.
While you aren’t paying a specified cost-per-click for organic traffic there is still a cost associated with it. Google Ads, which was previously the company’s AdWords product before it expanded its offerings, allows you to drive instant traffic to your website that can be converted into leads and sales.
There are three types of Google ads that need to part of your paid media strategy.
Local Service Ads
This is a newer offering from Google that results in more lead conversions because interested customers are connected to your business directly, without having to visit your website first. Let me explain how they work.
You still bid on keywords the same way you would for a standard window and door PPC campaign, but when the consumer clicks on your ad they are given the opportunity to either connect directly to your business on the phone or submit their information for a consultation.
If they visit your website first you still pay for the click and you have to rely on them picking up the phone or completing an opt-in form in order to generate a lead. Local service ads reduce the friction by eliminating that visit to your website, which leads to a much higher conversion rate.
Google Guaranteed is a perk that is offered as well, which protects the consumer for the full value of the service he or she contracts your window and door company to perform. As long as your business meets the requirements you are able to leverage this additional offering.
Google Display Network
Display ads a great way to lure previously interested consumers back to your website that didn’t convert into a lead in their previous visit. They might have gotten distracted or they just weren’t ready to make that commitment at the time.
By initiating a campaign that only targets those who have previously visited specific pages on your site, you are able to have banner ads “follow” those people across the internet, displaying your ads across all websites that are part of the GDN (Google Display Network).
Remember, these are people that are already familiar with your business, so you can use this to trigger emotions. For example, you could have a dynamic display ad that shows a beat up and broken door that morphs into a beautiful new door, with a heading along the lines of, “C_ome back. We have a special offer for you: 20% OFF that new door you want_!” and run it against people that were looking at your new door installation page.
Google PPC
Standard window and door PPC also needs to be part of your paid traffic strategy. You bid on keywords and search queries that are specific to your location as well as the window and door services and products your business offers.
This requires compelling ad copy that is related to the keyword(s) for each ad set, and then you need to send that traffic to landing pages that have relevant offers, which are designed to generate leads and make your phone ring. From there you need to turn those leads into paying customers.
Be prepared for a lot of split-testing and optimizing before your ideal CPL (cost-per-lead) is reached. Local competition will also play into your bidding strategy and lead acquisition cost. A window and door company in a small rural town in Alabama is going to face much less competition than a company in Los Angeles, California, for example.
Google Keyword Planner
Google’s Keyword Planner is a keyword tool that is primarily used for window and door PPC research, but it can also benefit your SEO planning as well. It’s an all-around search engine marketing tool that we use for two specific SEM campaign tasks:
PPC Keyword Research
There are always going to be very obvious keywords you are going to want to target in your campaign, like “[your location] window replacement” or “door installation in [your location].”
With the Keyword Planner tool, you can input the obvious keywords and see relevant and similar suggestions. It also tells you how competitive each term is and it provides you with an estimated CPC (cost-per-click).
Identifying Low Competition Keywords for SEO
While performing door and window PPC research, we can then create a list of the low competition terms that the Keyword Planner suggests and then look into targeting those in our SEO effort.
There is no concrete rule when it comes to keyword research. Sometimes looking at the suggestions in Google’s Keyword Planner will help spark some ideas. While the most popular keywords are attractive because of the traffic volume, they also have a lot of competition. The more low competition keywords we can identify and rank for, the faster we can increase the amount of quality monthly traffic your website generates.
Google My Business
Your Google My Business profile is one of the most important parts of your company’s online presence. It’s the information contained within this profile that Google’s algorithm pulls from for its Google Maps results — from your contact details to the replacement window Google reviews you receive.
If your Google My Business profile isn’t optimized correctly or you simply don’t have one you will not show up in the local search results. Marketing windows and doors can be extremely competitive, so you need to make sure you do everything possible to help give your business the online exposure needed to be successful.
Complete and accurate business contact information, location details, multiple images and an optimized description are all necessary. We will often create the business description based on the main local keywords we are trying to rank for in the Google Maps results. This is where the expertise of a window and door SEO company shines — the most subtle change will often yield the most extreme results — the key is to know how to properly optimize the Google My Business profile.
Google Search Console
Understanding how your website is performing in the SERPs (search engine result pages) helps you make adjustments and tweaks that improve your performance. One of the most effective tools to help you with this is Google Search Console.
You can dramatically improve your SEO if you learn how to use the information and data available from this free Google tool. There are many ways to leverage this, but let me quickly explain three of them that we focus on.
Identifying Errors
If one of your URLs is returning an error, such as a 404 (page not found) or 500 (internal server error), they will be listed here. In addition, if there are any issues with your pages related to mobile-usability, they will also be listed here.
You will want to address and fix these as quickly as possible. If not, Google might push you down in the search results, as a website with multiple errors is likely to not provide the type of experience they want for their users.
Discovering New Keywords
Search Console gives you access to all of the terms and search queries that were typed into Google causing your website to receive impressions. You can also see the position (rank) as well as the click-through rate (number of visitors) for each.
Often times you are able to discover new keywords to target in your window and door SEO campaign that you were not previously focused on. If your website is already receiving impressions for these terms they are likely to be low competition, requiring minimal effort and investment to dominate.
Using Data to Improve Page Titles and Descriptions
If you see pages that are receiving a lot of impressions, but extremely low click-through rates this gives you an opportunity to really explode your traffic numbers with a little optimizing.
If a particular page on your website is receiving a lot of impressions in the search results that means Google likes the content on the page. If the click-through rate is low, that means the person searching isn’t being immediately drawn to page title and description.
Find out what keyword is causing the impressions and then optimize your title and description to provide a solution. For example, if you have a page showing up on page one for the keyword “low cost replacement windows Dallas,” then you might want your page title and description to be:
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