In the home service industry, the goal of any marketing is to put your business in the forefront of customers’ minds when their need arises. Who do they call first when their garbage disposal breaks or when their sink backs up? Of course, you want that call to come to your plumbing business.

But more and more, homeowners aren’t making those calls based on prior knowledge or word of mouth. They’re turning to their mobile devices and smart-home speakers such as Alexa and Google Home.

This trend isn’t new. Mobile searches outpaced desktop searches on Google three years ago. Your website is probably optimized for mobile, but have you thought about optimizing your content for mobile search? The changing way consumers interact with the internet and the ever-evolving Google search engine algorithm make updating your content as important as updating the look and feel of your website on mobile. 

When done correctly, content can significantly boost your website’s mobile search ranking and entice potential clients to stay on your website longer. Here are some tips for making your content mobile-friendly.

Mobile users on a mission

Mobile users tend to be task-oriented. They are searching for something specific and are often in a hurry, standing in line at the grocery store or researching local plumbers on their lunch break. If a website doesn’t give them the answers they need, they will leave your site immediately, which is known as a “bounce” in the world of online marketing.

Blogging about frequently asked questions in your industry is a good tactic for getting to the top of the search results, keeping mobile users on your website and building consumer trust. Long-form, essay-style blogging isn’t optimal for mobile, so you should avoid it.

If mobile users bounce after too short a time, Google takes notice. A high bounce rate can hurt your search ranking. Well-crafted blogs can entice mobile users to linger and read more or explore other pages on your site, boosting your visibility.

Bite-sized content

Mobile users don’t have the time or attention to scour a webpage for the answers to their questions. They need large print and small sections of bite-sized content to find what they need on those small screens.

The best mobile-friendly blogs break content up with enticing subheadings and lists with bullets or numbers. They use shorter sentences and shorter paragraphs. This can seem contrary to what you learned in high school English class, but you don’t need the classic introduction, body paragraphs and conclusion. Mobile users are accustomed to the small-bite style, taking a high-level approach and skimming content as they scroll.

According to Jayson DeMers, writing for Forbes: “Including subheadlines and bullet points will help guide readers’ eyes to where they need to go and give them the high-level summaries they need to get the gist of what you’re writing. Obviously, a full read would be better but high-level reading is better than none at all.”

Changing the way you blog and the way you organize information on your website can have a tremendous impact on your mobile traffic and your SEO rankings, bringing more business to you.

Long tail keywords

Building often-searched keywords into your blogs is a standard method of boosting SEO, but optimizing search for today’s mobile user is making the single-word keyword obsolete. Instead, it is more effective to use long tail keywords, more like phrases, containing three or four words together.

To better understand this trend, think about the first time you used an internet search engine in the 1990s. Since there weren’t as many websites then as we have now, you could type in “faucet repair” and receive useful, meaningful results. Today, to get good results from a search engine, queries need to be more specific. Users have become savvier with crafting their search queries, too. They are likely to add more words to get more specific results.

Instead of searching “faucet repair,” consumers today will search something like, “How do I repair a leaky faucet?” Your blog keywords should reflect that difference. The more specific you can get with long tail keywords, the better. This specificity helps put you at the top of the relevant search results and points your ideal customers in your direction when they need you most.

Building trust

When you blog with mobile users in mind, you do more than boost your SEO. By reaching potential customers and answering their questions in easy-to-understand ways, you are building trust, adding value and delivering on your brand promise.

Mobile users who find useful answers on your website are more likely to come to you first when they have more questions or when they need your services. They are more likely to share your information with their friends or recommend you when someone they know has a plumbing issue.

When you blog, keep the service aspect in mind so your content is meaningful and not just strings of keywords.

It can be difficult to adapt to a new way of doing business, whether it’s a new office bookkeeping system or a new method of blogging. You can blog for mobile on your own or you can take the time and learning curve out of it by hiring a professional public relations agency with plenty of home service experience. Their expertise can identify the blog topics and keywords that will serve you best. They will be adept at formatting content into the bite-sized portions that mobile users need. 

However you go about it, blogging for mobile is a sound investment in your business growth.