Are you a pest control contractor looking to turn website visitors into paying customers? If so, building an SEO-friendly website structure is a must. Without one, it’s unlikely that people who are looking for an exterminator will even find your products or services in the first place.
A well-crafted technical SEO plan must be an integral component of your online marketing strategy. In this guide, we explore how to create a website framework that ensures you get the most value out of anyone who lands on your page from organic searches.
What’s Website Architecture?
When you’re on the job, eliminating pests always involves a structured plan, from performing initial inspections to deciding between baiting, trapping, or exclusion measures.
Website architecture is much the same! Your website architecture is the foundation of organizing and presenting content in an understandable and intuitive way for your two target audiences: humans who need your services and search engine crawlers that index your site so that it appears when people search for “pest control near me.”
Why Is Website Architecture So Important?
Google’s SEO starter guide explains that search engine crawlers are the automated “scouts” that search engines use to assess websites. They need to find content on each page of your website and deem the subject matter relevant and easy to decipher. Otherwise, you risk getting a poor rank in organic search results and remaining buried in the algorithm.
On the other hand, you also have to consider the user experience. By logically grouping content together and providing intuitive navigation systems, people become more likely to stay on a page, find what they need quickly, and ultimately convert into paying customers!
Implement These Tried and Tested SEO-friendly Website Strategies
As a pest control SEO company, we know a thing or two about optimizing website architectures. Let’s look at a few straightforward ways to help users and search engines access your content.
Create a Simple or Flat Hierarchy
Always remember; the simpler, the better! Start by limiting the number of clicks from the homepage to any other page on your website. Aim for a maximum of three to four clicks.
Common top-level category pages you could include in your architecture include Home, About Us, Services, Contact Us, and Blog. From there, you can use subcategories to provide more detailed information.
Delete Obsolete Pages
Having more pages doesn’t always count towards an SEO-friendly website structure. Maybe you have a blog post containing outdated advice or a page with services you no longer offer.
Every site has a “crawl budget” — the maximum number of pages a search engine will evaluate. To free up resources for the crawlers to focus on your more valuable pages, remove anything that no longer fits your current strategy or has zero relevance to your audience.
Make It Mobile-Friendly
Nowadays, people will likely access your content from different devices.
Go on your phone right now, and test the mobile version of your website. Does it load quickly and seamlessly? Do the words scale properly? No one wants to constantly pinch their screen or zoom in and out to read.
Some popular strategies to enhance the user experience on mobile include:
- Hamburger menus
- Collapsible panels
- Slide-in sidebars
- Footer navigation
Add Internal Links
Strategically placed internal links help search engines evaluate which pages are most important to your website. It’s a way of showing them the hierarchy and relationships between different sections.
Links also help customers find related content quickly or explore topics they may not have even considered! You could add an introduction sentence or paragraph followed by an anchor text that leads to a more detailed article.
Create an XML Sitemap
XML sitemaps help search engine crawlers understand the structure and purpose of all your pages much faster than if they had to rely on links alone. Think about it as a map that pinpoints every destination you want them to explore.
Most content management systems have plugins that generate this type of sitemap for you, but it’s always worth double-checking the finished product for any errors.
Keyword Research Is King
To find the right keywords for your content, you should think about search volume and traffic potential. Tools like Google Keyword Planner, Semrush, and Ahrefs can help you find relevant keywords and assess how easy it is to rank for them.
When you’re up against high-traffic websites, competitiveness matters. It might prove challenging to outrank them on popular keywords, so try to add long-tail keywords into the mix. These might have a lower search volume, but they’re also more specific and easier to rank for.
Optimize URL Structure
An SEO-friendly URL should be short, descriptive, and easy to understand. Avoid using special characters like *, %, ^, &, or symbols, as they can create confusion.
Include your target keyword where it makes sense, but try to keep the total amount of words in a URL under 80 characters and try to join them together in hyphens. If you have too many parameters, create a clean URL with a redirect leading to the original address.
Boost Your Site Speed
Having a slow website hurts your ranking and makes visitors give up. Optimize images, reduce HTTP requests, and clean up any bulky code that might hurt the loading times. Compress each page as much as possible to boost performance!
With a zippy platform, search engines can crawl multiple pages in a single session, which can lead to higher rankings. You can find many free online tools like Pingdom to measure your website’s loading time.
A Team You Can Trust for Comprehensive Pest Control SEO
Running a pest company already comes with enough challenges — and building an SEO-friendly website structure doesn’t have to be one of them. Let us handle the technical side of things, so you can focus on growing your business.
At MarketingPests, we’re SEO experts who specialize in marketing for pest control businesses. We can bust SEO myths and implement a custom marketing strategy tailored to your company.
Book your strategy session to find out how our marketing know-how can improve your website and drive organic traffic!
