5 SEO Tips for Computer Repair Companies
The New Year brings new challenges and new opportunities – and a whole host of new SEO trends. To succeed online in the coming year, computer repair companies in all parts of the country need to be aware of SEO updates and changes, and how to implement them in 2017 and beyond. With this in mind, here are the top SEO tips and tricks for 2017, and how you can use them to improve your computer repair company’s online presence.
5 SEO Tips for Computer Repair Companies in 2017
From getting found online to earning more customers, these five tips can help.
- Optimize your sites for rich answers
The computer repair business is one that inspires a lot of questions. When customers have questions about things like how to fix their Mac or why their PC is doing that funny thing, they head to Google for answers. With this in mind, optimize your site for rich answers. Rich answers are the answer snippets that show up at the top of the SERP page and provide an immediate answer to a searcher’s question. Here’s an example or a rich answer that showed up for the query “how to wipe a Mac computer”:
To optimize your content for rich answers, start your sentences with relevant command words, make sure your headings clearly mimic the potential query, and keep your answers short and pertinent. According to Stone Temple Consulting, rich answers appear in 19.45% of Google search queries, so optimizing for them could be one of the most valuable things you do all year.
- Be sure YMYL pages are high-quality
In 2015, Google released its Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines. These guidelines, designed to help train and educate Google’s human search experts, also provided some critical SEO information for business owners. Among that information is a discussion of YMYL pages.
YMYL stands for “Your Money or Your Life,” and indicates critically important pages that feature information or content with the potential to have an adverse impact on someone’s health, wealth, or well-being if it’s low-quality.
Typically, YMYL pages are medical and legal advice pages, so it might not seem like they apply to the computer repair industry. The one big exception, however, is financial transaction pages. If you have a check-out page or something similar on your website, it’s considered a YMYL page by Google and anything less than high-quality could get you in trouble.
With this in mind, be sure that you’re taking adequate steps to protect your customer’s financial information on your transaction pages by using a PayPal plugin or similar service. This will help prevent Google penalties and take you into the New Year healthy, wealthy, and wise.
- Speed up the mobile load time of your pages
Google introduced its AMP project in 2015, and the focus on fast mobile load times has only grown since then. According to Kissmetrics, 47% of customers expect web pages to load within 2 seconds. If they don’t, 40% of users will “bounce” off the page. Since Google looks at your page’s bounce rate when determining how to rank your site, this can have a severe negative impact on your SEO.
Fortunately, you can decrease your mobile bounce rate and provide a better mobile user experience by shortening your page’s load time. Simple things, like enabling compression, offering browser caching, optimizing your images with editing tools (and only uploading JPEGs), and cutting out any unneeded plugins can speed up your site’s load time and make for a better user experience across the board.
- Focus on clustering content around topics
Before search engines got as smart as they are today, they were deeply obsessed with determining a page’s purpose by identifying keyword phrases within the on-page content. Over time, marketers and writers caught on, and the practice of “keyword stuffing” began. The idea was that, if a writer could just stuff as many keyword phrases as possible into a piece of content, it would rank better in search engine results pages.
While this worked for a while, Google and other search engines caught on. All too often, keyword-stuffed content wasn’t quality content, and the search engines started punishing these shoddy SEO practices as a result. Today, keywords still matter, but not the way that they used to.
If you conduct keyword research to align your website pages or create content, one of the best things you can do in 2017 is, as HubSpot recommends, to start focusing on topics rather than terms. Instead of targeting one keyword phrase repeatedly with multiple pages, blogs, and articles, focus on creating a cluster of topics around a given keyword phrase.
This serves two critical purposes. On the one hand, it creates a diverse and useful content strategy your readers and customers can connect with. On the other, it broadens your chances to rank for relevant keyword phrases.
Need an example? If your target keyword phrase is “Mac computer repair,” some examples of related topics might include:
- 5 Mistakes to Avoid When Fixing Your Mac Computer
- How to Find a Mac Computer Repair Specialist Who Won’t Break the Bank
- Common Mac Computer Problems (& How to Fix Them at Home)
- 10 Simple Updates That Decrease Your Mac Computer’s Need for Repair
While not all these topics include the keyword phrase, verbatim, they all focus on the topic at hand. As such, they provide ongoing value to the reader.
- Improve your page’s speed
While load time is critical to mobile users, page speed, in general, is a top priority for 2017. Google has made it clear that page speed is one of the most important ranking signals, and improving yours can go a long way toward earning you more views and visits.
To find out where your page speed currently sits, and learn how to improve it, use a tool like Google’s PageSpeed Insights. Simply drop in your URL, and the tool will analyze your site and provide tips for improvement.
Improve Your SEO to Improve Your Business in 2017
SEO is a commonly overlooked facet of running a computer repair business. By taking steps to improve your SEO in 2017, you can build your business and earn more organic customers in the New Year.
