I met with Amy Graham from Limcora this week and had the pleasure of discussing their business strategy and direction. They are market leaders in the Plumbing Industry in North West Sydney. Having been in business for 40 years, they have grown substantially and now have 80 staff. They mostly target B2B clients such as project managers of construction companies. However, they also target owner builders and partner with other plumbers who need their specialised Drainage service.
Their website was designed and built by Rachelle Font from https://www.fontmedia.com.au/ and as usual, is excellent. We have worked with Rachelle for many years and know her to be a high quality and highly reliable businessperson.
So, without further ado, let’s start working through our Top Ten Tips!
Top 10 Tips
10. Think Feel Do like your customer.
You can read more about our Think Feel Do framework here. But put simply it’s a system to help us very quickly assess how well the website conveys a clear message (Think), whether the images and style make us like the business (Feel), and what Calls to Action are included on the homepage (DO).
Think. The message is very clear on the website, it simply says Limcora – Plumbing & Drainage. Nothing more needs to be added to this.
Feel. I really love the use of video for the hero shot and this video shows multiple locations of jobs where Limcora has worked. Unfortunately, at the time of writing the video is playing up and has jammed on a black screen for me. It has jammed at different stages of the video when I’ve viewed it so this needs to be corrected.
Do. In the top right-hand corner is a phone number. Lovely! You wouldn’t believe how often the phone number is missing from the home page.
9. Set up Google Tag Manager
When I ran a site audit I could see that 31 pages were missing Google Analytics. I would recommend setting up Google Tag Manager as it is a more flexible and robust (a bit more complex too) method of tracking how people are using your website. Part one of our “How to” series on setting up Google Tag Manager is here, and here is part 2.
Google Analytics is crucial in helping us understand how people behave when they come to our website. Based on this information we can open the door to a range of further optimisations that can be implemented based on human behaviour.
8. Make the phone number click to call
A large proportion of your traffic is coming from people on mobile devices so we need to make it easy for people to call you from their phone. The straightforward way to do this is to make the phone number clickable. People don’t want to have to copy and paste the number into their phone app, they just want to click and call. I would expect that plumbers do a lot of work on-site and on their phone so helping them contact you has to be beneficial.
The second benefit of this is that having set up Google Tag Manager you can now track this click as an event or goal in Analytics and get a report on how many phone calls you received.
7. Move the entire site to https:
This utilises the SSL (secure certificate) and will make people and Google like your site more. This is a known ranking factor and will be one small but key step towards more SEO traffic.
6. Improve your load speed
Google likes websites that load quickly. It wants to give people reliable results and quick access to the information they need. If your website takes longer to load than your competitors, you are putting yourself at a disadvantage. Limcora’s desktop load speed is 54/100 and the mobile load speed is 44/100. Simply by minimising the file size of images and installing a WordPress plugin, you can improve the load speed. Ideally, we would like to have it up over 80, but any improvement from where it is would be beneficial.
5. A little technical SEO
In the site audit, we can see about 218 SEO issues which range from minor through intermediate to highly important. It is worth investing the time to bring these issues down to zero. As a summary, there are some missing meta descriptions, meta descriptions that are too long or short, some pages with low word count, a couple of pages with duplicate content, a broken link, some links missing anchor or alt text and some images missing anchor or alt text. 218 may feel like a big number, however, we have seen some sites with over 40,000 so in the scheme of things you have a little housekeeping to do, not major renovations.
4. Blog Strategy
Writing a regular blog has many benefits. In pure SEO terms, it adds content to your website which helps you rank for new keywords and shows Google that your site has fresh content. These factors alone will help increase your traffic. However, good content can be used to post across social media, used in email newsletters and campaigns and also used to teach and educate customers about who you are and why you are experts in your field. Here at TheOnlineCo. we blog at least once a week. A weekly blog is probably a good rule of thumb. I can see that you have started blogging monthly and I love the topic “More than just poo movers!”
3. Plumber Sydney
I conducted some reasonably deep keyword research and we find ourselves in a conundrum when it comes to Google and plumbers. We can see that there are 2,900 searches per month for the term “plumber Sydney” and we know that many of the searches are mums and dads looking for someone to come and fix their toilet. However, we also know that bigger fish are using these identical keywords. So how do we separate the wheat from the chaff? The simple answer is that we can’t, any marketing into this space will attract minnows, tuna, and great white sharks. The more complex answer is that with testing of messaging and demographic filtering we may be able to dissuade the little guys from contacting and filter in the bigger contracts. I would recommend a 3-6 month Ads trial to measure return on investment on these keywords and if successful then pursue an SEO strategy to dominate this area.
2. Competitor Awareness
http://www.mcplumbing.com.au/
http://www.dwplumbing.com.au/
http://www.goldman.com.au/plumbing/commercial-plumbing/
http://www.theplumbingwizard.com.au/commercial-plumbing/
These are the top four ranking websites for the term “Commercial Plumbing” Put aside the SEO for a minute and ask this question “What are people experiencing about these sites that is better than yours?” What can we learn and implement from these guys? Clearly, Google thinks they are the most relevant responses to this term. It’s possible that if you implement point 1 you will leapfrog them easily.
1. Commercial Plumbing & Drainage
At the moment, your best keywords are “commercial plumbing” and “commercial drainage.” I would suggest optimising the homepage for these two keywords and see if you can jump onto the front page of Google quickly. The second test would be to optimise two pages solely around these two terms. They seem to fit your business more tightly than “Plumber Sydney” and could give you some quick breakthroughs.
Summary
There are some really great ways forward for Limcora which could yield enormous benefits. SEO takes time and patience; however, the results are almost always really worth it!
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