How Technical SEO Makes Your HVAC Website Rank in Google
When it comes to SEO (search engine optimization) on an HVAC or other home services website, there are levels of complexities most people have no clue about. It’s much like using herbs and spices in a recipe—each has its own special taste and purpose, but when used together, they create something unique.
In this blog, as well as next month’s, we’re going to take a bird’s-eye view of two SEO types and how they impact your HVAC, plumbing, or electrical home services website. This month, technical SEO; next month, onsite SEO. Just like those herbs and spices, these two SEO types play different roles but need to work together for success.
What Is Technical SEO for HVAC and Plumbing Websites?
So what is technical SEO? Technical SEO is all about how we build your website. It’s everything involved in how your site gets from the server to the browser, starting with creating a domain name and IP (Internet Protocol) address and finishing with its appearance in a browser. It’s a complicated recipe with BxB as the head chef.
To fully understand technical SEO for your HVAC, plumbing, or electrical home services site, you have to keep in mind your website’s content is not only read by humans but also by search engines, like Google and Bing. This type of SEO focuses on the technical elements required to communicate to Google what your site is all about to help it rank for the correct things. If we fail to do our job with technical SEO, search engines can’t find you.
What Elements Are Involved in Technical SEO for HVAC, Plumbing, or Electrical Websites?
There’s a long list of components to consider with technical SEO when BxB creates your website. For instance, here’s only the tip of the iceberg on what our team needs to think about, execute, or maintain:
▶︎ Your site’s code written with programming languages —At BxB, our developers typically use three main programming languages: HTML handles what your site says (titles, content); CSS handles how your site looks (color, fonts); and JavaScript handles how your site behaves (interactive, dynamic).
▶︎ How fast your site and its pages load—If your site or any page is slow in loading, your site visitor will quickly return to their SERP (search engine results page) for another company option with a faster load time. Images tend to be the biggest culprit for slowing down page loads.
▶︎ The Core Web Vitals for your HVAC, plumbing, or electrical site—These are three metrics that rate, or score, a user’s experience while loading your page. They show how quickly page content loads, how long before a user can interact with your page, and how stable or unstable your content is as it loads in the browser. We especially care about the Core Web Vitals because these factors contribute to your page ranking well.
Again, this just touches the surface on some of the elements involved in technical SEO for your website, but it gives you an idea of how complex it is. Our developers additionally corral specifics for graphics, server requests, content tags, responsive design, and a host of other items.
How Do Search Engines Understand Your Heating and Cooling Website?
Search engines can translate what’s on your website by “crawling” your website with software or bots to index the content so it can be searched. The crawling indexes all the data to provide relevant links during a search engine query. Keep in mind, search engines exist to serve searchers, which in your case are homeowners looking for HVAC, plumbing, or electrical services.
Obviously this is a massive undertaking since many HVAC, plumbing, and electrical home services sites can easily have 10,000 or more words. What makes this feat manageable is schema, or schema markup—a code that labels or organizes your content enabling search engines to understand what’s what.
At BxB, we use schema in different ways to help provide structure to all your site’s data. After we implement the schema, we test everything to be sure all the data is searchable, just how we intend it to be.
Why Is Responsive Website Design Critical?
When we design your website, we design it to be responsive. That means your site will fit whatever screen size and device someone is using. We want your web page to automatically respond to the device and its size.
If someone looking at your site on their phone has to pinch the screen to make it fit, if the images are cut off, or if the spacing is sporadic and words don’t wrap on the page, that potential customer is going to be frustrated and look elsewhere.
Our team goes to great lengths to be sure your site is mobile friendly, especially since over half of viewers now favor their mobile phones over their desktops for searches. We always want customers to have a good experience on your site.
BxB Manages Your Site’s Technical SEO!
This is a brief overview of what BxB does to manage the technical SEO to ensure your HVAC, plumbing, or electrical website’s overall success. Our team prioritizes all these technical SEO factors so your site is not only found and read by humans, but also search engines. For a more in-depth discussion of SEO in general, get in touch with your BxB Marketing Coach if you are already working with us, and if not, reach out here.