24/7 SEO monitoring? Social media management? Metadata?
What exactly are self storage SEO services promising? And does your business need them? In this blog, StoragePug will talk about what services are practical and useful and which ones are more… imaginative.
Self storage operators don’t (usually) have time to become SEO experts. You’re far more focused on day-to-day operations, for good reason - no amount of SEO can make your business profitable if you don’t take care of your customers.
How, then, can you decide whether or not these self storage marketing services are worth the investment?
You’ve got a limited marketing budget, so you need to be sure that you’re getting a strong return on your investment. Self storage SEO services are going to advertise their help in the best possible light - as they should, since they’re marketers!
What exactly are you getting, though?
Keyword Research - Every SEO service should offer keyword research. This is one of the basics, and it’s not particularly hard to do for the self storage industry.
Using several different tools, the researcher will test different phrases to see what your potential renters are typing into Google. Finding keywords for self storage almost always boils down to “self storage units near me,” references to your area, and then specific terms based on any special services you offer.
If all you need is keyword research, you can probably handle that on your own! After an hour or so getting accustomed to the research tools, you’ll be able to find the right keywords.
Content Writing - After determining what keywords are applicable to your business, the self storage SEO service will need to put those keywords on your website. Without content, Google (and other search engines) may not understand what you’re actually offering.
Content is also helpful to your customers. In good content, you’ll explain what your facility offers, how that helps your tenants, and why they should choose you over the competition! You should have a hand in writing the content, though, as the writers you hire won’t know nearly as much about your business as you do.
Content is necessary for your keywords to have any value. If you simply drop keywords on your site without context, Google will penalize your SEO strength. You’ll also need to make sure that your content is well-written and grammatically acceptable, which hiring a pro can help with.
Social Media Marketing - Many self storage marketing services offer to manage your social media presence. This is a big deal for many industries, and companies can generate lots of interest through social media.
For self storage, though, you may want to pass. Social media is about reaching as many people as possible, getting your brand in front of the populace. But for self storage, your customers are determined by proximity! That means even if social media can spread your brand far and wide, your number of potential customers doesn’t really increase.
A social media presence can help you find customers. It’s great to be the most well-known brand in your town! But being well-known six towns over won’t help you much.
So, if you do invest in social media marketing, try to make it as local as possible. Make sure you’re not paying to have your brand plastered online in markets you can’t reach!
Link Building - This is one of the most commonly advertised and misunderstood routes for self storage SEO.
Google takes links to your site as votes of confidence. A new website may try to trade links with other sites in its industry to build up site authority. This will help the site appear in organic search results.
But for a local business, link building isn’t nearly as effective.
That’s because the majority of your clicks come from your Local Pack listing. Local Pack ranking comes from your Google Business Profile, your reviews, and your content, not from link building. The Local Pack gets around 44% of total clicks.
Link building can help your organic rankings, though. These are the results that show up beneath the Local Pack, and they get a good portion of the clicks (around 29%), but if your marketing budget is small, this may not be the best way to increase your rentals.
SEO services will offer these services and more, including pay-per-click ad management, reputation management, and other nebulous services. We can’t address all of these here, but we can offer some advice.
Be sure that whatever services you buy are going to increase your rentals. A blog may sound like a great idea, but a small operation won’t see much benefit, even if your blog is great.
You may want to tackle some of these challenges yourself, too! And many of these can be done by a self storage operator without too much difficulty.
Should I hire SEO services for:
Keyword research? No. If you’re just looking for keywords, check out our how to choose self storage keywords guide! It might take you a while to learn these tools, but once you’ve got your keywords, you don’t need professional help to update them. They’re not changing very fast.
Content writing? Yes. Writing content can be time consuming and requires a set of skills that not everyone has. If you fancy yourself a wordsmith, you can certainly do it yourself! But if you can find this service as part of a website-building package, you won’t need to.
Social media marketing? Probably not. Social media pros are undoubtedly great at their job, and would get your branding in front of many more people than you could alone. But, given the local nature of self storage, this service just isn’t that valuable to the average self storage operator.
Link building? No (unless). Most small operations will have a hard time cracking the organic search results for “self storage in [your area].” If your market is at all competitive, it'll be hard for a small website to get more traction than a REIT or aggregator. If that’s you, don’t worry about link building! On the other hand, larger operators may want to invest in the self storage SEO services required to get those organic result spots. If you do want to crack the organic results, you’ll almost certainly need help from the pros.
Self storage SEO is a long game. If you get everything set up correctly, including your Google Business Profile, your website, and your content, it can still take months and months for Google to find you and rank you properly.
Updating it constantly won’t help. If you do the simple stuff right, you’ll eventually move up in Google’s rankings. Paying to have someone tweaking your keywords every month is unlikely to result in more rentals.
Now, if you wait a year and your website still isn’t ranking where you want? An SEO health check may well be worth the money! But be careful before paying for “ongoing SEO updates.”
Google does change its algorithm frequently, but that is almost always trying to “serve searchers better results.” Google’s recent updates have been trying to filter out bad information, trying to refine its keyword recognition, and giving more weight to authoritative sources. Usually, these updates won’t affect your rankings at all.
For ongoing fees, make sure the SEO service is providing you real returns! If you’re buying a website, make sure they will take care of your SEO as part of the deal (like StoragePug does).
For more information, check out our GabFocus Spotlight on self storage SEO!
Learn more ways to improve your self storage facility with these:
At StoragePug, we build self storage websites that make it easy for new customers to find you and easy for them to rent from you.
