You might have come across many flooring SEO firms claiming they can do SEO for flooring companies, but how to know if a local SEO campaign for your company will really be successful? Let’s skip all the marketing and SEO jargon and get to the real question about flooring company SEO:
How to get more customers as a flooring contractor using SEO?
“It’s the ability to generate a constant flow of leads that determines which businesses are successful in the long run.”
There are to practical method that ensure successful investment in SEO for flooring contractors. Flooring company SEO takes time and requires investment from the business, so it’s really important to get it right.
Geographical Targeting with Flooring SEO
Geographical targeting in simple terms means targeting all the areas close to you using Flooring SEO, specifically and not broadly, zooming in as much as possible and targeting as small an area as possible.
In this strategy, we are laser focused, instead of targeting broad areas where there are bigger flooring companies that are not willing to give up market share.
The strategy is to start by targeting a smaller area where there are essentially no competitors, dominate it, do it in a few other areas and then, we can start to broaden our targeting.
It goes like this:
“King of the neighborhood > king of the town > king of the city > king of the state.”
For example, say you run a home service business in Los Angeles California, one of the most competitive cities in the world for the flooring business. Many floor installers are active in LA and would like to take advantage of SEO to get more customers.
The average business owner would think that they are not be able to compete with the top flooring businesses in the city as they are dominating and have larger budgets.
They think it’s still better to rely on word of mouth in 2024. In a few minutes you will understand, these are all excuses. Because they don’t know what you’re about to know.
As of 2024, just in Los Angeles, there are 572 different neighborhoods reported to exist. There are also neighboring cities and suburbs, that are within the standard radius of your business that you are unaware of or never paid attention to.
With geo-graphical targeting, we go for parts of the city, neighborhoods, local areas, small towns, smaller neighboring cities, you can go even further by targeting famous avenues, parks, or even nicknames of neighborhoods.
For instance, here we will able to target all the areas with a red underline, if we want even easier targets, we can go for small neighborhoods instead of small cities.
There is much more traffic (leads) in smaller cities or neighborhoods to capture than you might think, so many customers in each of these smaller areas that we are now targeting exclusively.
The targeting of specific areas should not be random as it needs thorough market research of how much demand there is to capture in that area.
Implementation:
This strategy can be perfectly implemented through Local SEO targeting (1) and that’s where it has worked the best by far, as you have complete freedom as to where, and what you want to target.
See the screenshot below:
Whereas PPC or Pay-Per-Click ads (2), impose some restrictions that limit the efficiency and results of this strategy despite being awesome for this strategy. The quickest channel to implement this is PPC ads (Google, Facebook, Instagram).
Local Search Targeting
Demand targeting vs. Interest targeting
To put it simply,
Demand targeting is matching a buyer’s needs (homeowner), who is actively looking for flooring companies on Google or Bing. That’s the right time to interact with them as they are in the buying mindset, which is the closest step to making a purchase and closing a deal. They way to capture these high intent homeowner leads that are looking for flooring is SEO.
Practical: a homeowner whose house has been flooded and their hardwood floors were damaged, is expected to instantly pick up their phone and look up “hardwood flood damage restoration”. This is the mindset which we try to “catch” every lead in.
This is why we see businesses with 50% conversion rate from clicks coming from Google, an extremely high percentage compared to any other medium of advertising.
The average conversion rate for demand targeting on Google is worst case – 8%. realistic – 10-20% and best case 50% which is significantly higher than 5% to 15% conversion rate of paid ads. This is measured on flooring installers
Interest targeting on the other hand, means relying on a platforms data collection technology and taking advantage of it to find people who are interested in the general scope of your services.
This strategy is more effective when trying to sell low cost services and products as the higher the ticket price, the higher correlation there is to a lead’s mindset at the moment of encountering your ads.
Interest targeting is always a go-to for bigger brands, as they want to be omnipresent in their industry, and always be in front of their target audience. Simply to stay “relevant”.
Therefore, when you see Home Depot or Walmart running an ad on Pinterest, or Instagram, what they are doing is most probably branding campaigns.
You can be certain that they will be present on such platforms constantly and not just for one day, as they are not measuring the direct response (customers) they are getting, for each ad campaign.
If you try to get customers through branding as a local business owner without millions of dollars to burn, rarely it leads to anything except disappointment.
Trying to implement strategies that big corporations use can often times be really costly for local businesses.
As a contractor it’s good to know that first you need to match customers’ demands, not their interests, as you should increase your revenue as soon as possible to grow and stay in business.
Increasing your revenue, allows you to take better and more calculated risks like spending to find strategies with higher and faster returns, instead of constantly being worried of what’s next.
Always match the demand.
Matching the demand, doesn’t require much branding, authority or even reputation.
When you have a baseline revenue that’s giving you confidence and a sense of security in your business, you can then (and only then) focus on interest targeting and demand generation.
*Generating demand will be discussed later in the guide.
Implementation:
Local search targeting is a strategy where you target audiences and active buyers of your services independently for each service that you offer.
You can implement this strategy through search engine Pay-Per-Click ads (SEM: Search engine marketing) such as Google or Bing (paid), or local SEO (free).
Local search targeting goes beyond the standard local SEO for flooring installers, as it includes components like targeting highly specific audiences.
Try to think of as many specific services within your business as possible, and avoid any generalization. Think in terms of parts of a house (interior and exterior), and in terms of services they might need.
Break these down into as many services (combinations) as possible
Where: Kitchen, Basement, Bathroom, Living room, Roof, Garden, Pool, Bedroom, etc.
What to do: Repair, Installation, Restoration, Remodel, Renovation, Coating, Covering, Sanding, Refinishing, etc.
To make it practical: Instead of targeting general flooring, target “kitchen hardwood flooring”, “outdoor tile flooring”, “Deck floor refinishing”, and “Basement Remodel”.
This is what homeowners are searching for, not a general “flooring company.” If you put these pages up, you get leads from Google for free.
How-to: For each of these combinations create a website page, describe how you do this service, why they should choose you, and lastly include images of your past work the exact service.
If you want to get more creative, you can combine this with geographical targeting and make it even more specific.
Important: SEO marketing is a long-term play, as it might take from 4 to 12 months to take up.
The 6-8 months mark, is when it usually clicks for most companies we have worked with.
You need to be patient with this process, and make patience your advantage, as your competitors (most of them) do not have it.
Local search optimization is an investment of your time and money into creating a lifelong asset, and that’s the mindset you need when you choose this medium of customer acquisition as flooring contractor or installer.
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Q & A
Does SEO really work for flooring?
SEO is possibly the best long-term marketing strategy to generate leads for flooring contractors. The clicks you receive are free and high quality, as most searched are made by high-intent buyers. One disadvantage with SEO is that it takes time and it’s sort of a long-term customer acquisition strategy. You can find a good presentation on contractor SEO here. Based on our experience with flooring companies we could say that local SEO for flooring installers works for most companies.
Is SEO the best way to generate leads and land more customers for flooring companies?
Many agencies and SEO companies that offer flooring SEO services claim that SEO is the best way to get flooring leads. The advantage with Local SEO for flooring is that inbound click to your website are free. However, there are better advertising channels in terms of the duration it takes to see results from local search optimization. PPC ads, using either Google ads or Facebook are better options to get local customers, possibly homeowners in your area quickly.
Are you a hardwood flooring business owner? Check out hardwood flooring SEO.