Creating online content for customers to read goes far beyond just writing convincing web copy for your website. As the online community is now looking to blogs, review websites and social media for opinions on small businesses, you need to make your presence known on those platforms.
This article explains why PGS London Plumbers have created PGS Online – an all-encompassing expert property maintenance blog aimed at property owners, to keep the PGS branding in mind.
At PGS we take our after-sales support very seriously – both through the direct services we supply to our customers and the auxiliary information we supply through our online property maintenance blog, PGS Online.
A common problem that a small business like PGS London Plumbers encounters when trying to build an online following is mainly convincing people to express an interest in a service they might only use once or twice a year.
Generally speaking, a plumber is something people would prefer to not have to deal with. They’re associated with unwanted expense of fixing broken boilers, water leaks and so on – this makes it very hard to build an online following.
To get round this, we decided to rebrand our company blog into a highly-interactive property maintenance tips website.
With well over a year’s worth of property maintenance blog content already written, we felt that if this was displayed in a more user-friendly way, then this is a perfect way to retain brand awareness.
PGS Online publishes three exclusive articles each week. For the sake of our search engine rankings, we stick to this religiously. Each of these articles is search-engine optimised and written on useful property maintenance-related subjects for our customers.
Having this content, which is then promoted on social media, boosts the PGS branding. It shows that we do care about our customers and their property. We want them to get involved with DIY and be informed about the possibilities of improving their home.
We’ve noticed that acting as a trusted source of information increases conversions. We’ve seen an increasing number of conversations occur through PGS Online.
As there is so much exclusive content on the website, it acts as a huge net for long-tail searches (less common searches but for this reasons, ones that are easier to appear on Google for), bringing in traffic that the trade websites wouldn’t do on their own.
We only add subtle references to the PGS London Plumbers site – and other trade websites – on the PGS Online website, but the clickthrough rate is strong. Using our tracking we can tell who has got in contact, quantifying the effectiveness of PGS Online.
Keeping the focus of PGS Online as a non-sales tool is the main key. None of the articles we write are directly selling a single product or service of ours. The key is to feed our visitors with information that’ll keep us in mind when any property maintenance work is required.
We’ve learnt that customer trust now lies far beyond just the quality of service or product you supply. Thinking of other ways to help out customers outside of your direct services is now paramount in building your brand’s reputation online, making sure in time they come back for return business.
Visit the PGS Online website
Visit the PGS London Plumbers website
