Back in the day, dry cleaning businesses got their reputation by word of mouth. Today, there’s a new form of word of mouth, and it’s called the internet.
The web is just that — a web of connectivity that helps businesses like yours link up with customers needing your services. But connecting with these individuals is an art of its own. It takes careful planning and consistency to establish and maintain.
And it doesn’t even have to be expensive. A lot of businesses are using affordable SEO methods to raise awareness for their brands. You can do the same.
The following guide will help you understand how affordable SEO can grow your dry cleaning revenue.
1. Build a Responsive Web Design
Google and other search engines love websites that are mobile-friendly. And not only that – your mobile-using visitors will love it as well.
The great thing about a responsive web design is that it caters to both your desktop and mobile device users. Plus, it saves you time and money on building and managing two separate websites.
Then since your site is deemed mobile-friendly, you will get ranked higher in the search engine results pages (SERPs).
2. Get Rid of Any Link Errors
When folks visit your dry cleaners website, they shouldn’t end up at a dead end after clicking on a few links. It’s important to ensure all the links on your site are working.
So be sure to check them all. And if you run into any errors like 404 redirects, then remove the link or correct them. Having these broken links on your website will only hurt your website ranking in the SERPs.
3. Check the Quality of Your Backlinks
And speaking of links, you should also ensure the backlinks in your portfolio are high quality. All this means is having links pointing to your site from websites that are relevant and contain valuable content.
For instance, you don’t want links pointing to your website from a site about water filters. Or a link from a wedding dress website that has low-quality content or that uses blackhat SEO methods.
Remember, Google looks to help visitors find the information they’re looking for. So if you’re pointing dry cleaning customers to a site that doesn’t matter to them, then it will hurt your site rank.
4. Select the Best Keywords and Key Phrases
This is a very important step because it’s how you’ll attract visitors to your site organically. Now that your site is mobile-friendly, you can further boost its visibility by using certain keywords.
Again, relevancy is key here. You want to select keywords and phrases that your customers are using, then place them strategically throughout your content.
This includes your home page, service page, about us page and all the other pages. Your articles, blogs and ads can also use these keywords.
There are different tools you can use to find the best keywords. One, in particular, is the Google Keyword Tool. Here, you want to focus on keywords with a high search count, as well as medium to low competition.
Selecting a bunch of high-competition keywords will only make it more difficult to rank for them. Why? Because all your competitors who’ve already ranked for them will have to get pushed down. And that will take some serious time.
However, some businesses choose to focus on both low and high competition keywords.
5. Optimize All of Your Tags
Your website uses all sorts of code to build its interface. This includes title tags, ALT tags, meta tags and so on. You should optimize all of these, since Google bots read them when crawling your site.
So optimizing your tags will help boost your ranking in the SERPs.
For example, you should place keywords inside of your title tag (which your titles and subheadings should already have anyway). The meta description tag describes the page or blog post, which too should have a keyword or two inside of it.
Then your photos contain ALT tags. Since images aren’t read by Google bots, you can use Alt tags to tell them what the image is about. Just make sure to include a relevant keyword within the tag.
6. Build Up Your Link Profile
Now, there are different ways you can go about building up your link profile. And while you’re doing so, you want to avoid one costly mistake – taking any backlinks you can get.
It’s important to remember that having a handful of quality links means a lot more to Google than hundreds of low-quality links.
And even if you have a mix of high- and low-quality links, the low-quality links will still drag down your ranking. So it’s better to eliminate and avoid low-quality links altogether.
Your best bet is to opt for link placement on sites you know are relevant to your dry cleaning business. For instance, you can write a guest post for sites that revolve around business suits and wedding dresses, fashion, home cleaning and anything else that can relate to dry cleaning.
7. Get On Social Media
You definitely don’t want to overlook the benefits social media offers. It’s one of the most affordable SEO techniques you can use. For one, it boosts your brand visibility. And two, it connects you directly with your customers and prospects.
There’s no better way to engage with hundreds, thousands or even millions of people at once. So you should have profiles and pages set up on platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and Google+.
Research where your customer base spends a lot of time and focus on generating content there. Begin conversations and join them whenever you can. It’s not just about making your own posts or promoting your brand.
Social media requires more genuine engagement. So follow the golden rule: 30% your content, 60% curated content and 10% promotional content.
In other words, the majority of your posts should be informational and valuable to your audience.
Put Together an Affordable SEO Strategy
Now, it’s time to strategize your affordable SEO plan. The above tips are valuable but don’t stop there. You can find a variety of other useful tips to further boost your Google ranking.
But before you focus on your position in the SERPs, you have to ensure your website hosting is up to par. The last thing you need is for your site to be down more than it’s up.
At SiteUptime, you can have your site monitored 24/7. This way, you know right away when your website is down. Use this to determine whether your web host is any good.
And if not, switch to a company that’s better. If you would like to have your website monitored by a premier service, then contact SiteUptime today!
