Getting Your Business Found: SEO Techniques for Home Energy Professionals.

According to research by BIA/Kelsey and ConStat, 97% of consumers now use the internet to find local businesses, or to research local businesses before making purchases.

What this means for your business — which is, after all, an inherently local business — is that the online realm should be an increasingly integral part of your marketing strategy, if you want to capture any fraction of those 97% of consumers who are searching for your services in your area.

While crafting your online presence to maximize sales and leads is a bigger topic than we can cover in this single blog post (for more information about how to optimize your website to maximize sales, check out our free white paper, “Putting Your Website to Work: Best Practices for Home Performance Professionals”), one of the most important components of an effective web strategy is Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

You may be familiar with SEO already, you may not be; either way, this post focuses on basic on-page SEO strategy specifically for home energy professionals. So if you have a geothermal, solar or otherwise related business, read on.

(Editors note: Join HeatSpring on facebook to keep up to date on events, tips, resources and news. If you’re a clean energy professional, request to join HeatSpring’s linkedin group for Clean Energy Professionals)

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Increasing Focus on Building Efficiency Will Have Consumers Talking

“A house needs to breathe,” but how much does it need to breathe? Recently developed standards and increasingly affordable measurement tools have made it easier to answer that question with precision, and we’re now able to target one of the largest sources of heat loss/heat gain in existing buildings. Efficiency and weatherization are growing in mass-market appeal because they are a good investment – even in the short term. But, like geothermal heat, and unlike solar and wind, they are not a form of ‘conspicuous production.’  They do not necessarily sell themselves. Beyond dollars and cents, you need a way to ‘jazz up’ efficiency and weatherization for the wide range of your customers. You need to be able to justify building these services into a larger business strategy, so here are some things for you to consider:
Selling Efficiency
Beyond the money, your potential customers will often ask, “Why?” or “Why now?” Or they may say, “Why not a granite countertop first?” Or so many other things. To answer them, it helps to think globally, and locally. Building efficiency is essential to the nation, sure, but it’s also essential to the well being of local communities. It is, probably, one of the easiest ways of doing well by doing good.

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