Your website isn’t just a nice to have anymore. It’s your digital storefront.
And most pest control companies are setting it up completely wrong.
I run Pest Control SEO, a digital marketing agency for pest control companies, and I’ve personally audited hundreds of pest control websites. The mistakes are consistent, they’re costing you money, and they’re easier to fix than you think.
Why Your Website Actually Matters
Think of your website almost as your digital storefront.
When you think about having an actual physical business that you have people walking by, okay, hey look, that’s Julie’s Bakery or whatever. It’s Panera Bread, might be a bigger chain. But this is how people know you. This is how people land on your business and then get to know more about you.
For these other local businesses, they see it, it might seem nice. It’s a bakery, it’s a coffee shop, it’s a pizza place. Okay, I’ll walk in there.
That’s kind of the same with your website. People will do a search and they might do a search for pest control near me, or they might even do a search for your actual site and they get there. That is them walking into the store.
When they get into the store, what do they see?
If someone walked into your physical storefront and they saw that it was a complete mess, that there are boxes everywhere, it’s totally dirty, your employees are wearing ragged clothes and such, then you’d probably not want to go in that place. You probably would not want to purchase anything from them.
That’s the same way you can think about your website.
When someone comes on your website, you want to make sure that it’s presentable, that it also matches your brand. And that’s something we’ve been talking about lately, how important branding is. We want to make sure that branding is not only on your truck, on your logo, on these other things, but that it’s also on your website and that your website looks really good.
There’s kind of this back and forth between SEO versus design, but we really actually need both. You really should have a great looking website. This is something Jonas talks about, having a premium brand. A big part of that is having a premium looking website.
So that is the design aspect, but then there’s a whole other aspect of your website actually potentially making you money, of ranking on keywords and such.
The Pages Your Website Actually Needs
Let me break this down into what you actually need.
The Homepage
The very first page you should have, and really everyone has this, is your homepage. Your homepage will be actually just your domain. That might be xyzpestcontrol.com, that might be greendaypest.com, that might be pestcontrolseo.com.
Something most people don’t understand is that a website is a collection of pages. So it’s not just one page. A website is a collection of pages.
A lot of people say, “Rank my website number one and just do SEO for me.” It’s like, well, the first thing you need to understand is that it’s not just one page. It’s a collection of pages under the same domain.
Your homepage is where a lot of people are going to land. You’re probably putting that on your truck, that might be on the mailers, that might be on other places. Your website is probably going to be plastered everywhere and you’re likely not going to be taking them to those other pages.
A lot of times you might get a referral, you might be talking to someone and they’re like, “Tell me more about your company” or “Give me your website.” Obviously you’re not going to take them to some random page. They’re going to go to your homepage.
So that’s obviously super important. We want to make sure that’s set up and optimized.
The Basic Pages You Need
In terms of other web pages that we want to have, there are some core basic ones.
We want to make sure that we have an about page. We want to make sure that we have a contact page. A little more technical, we want to have a 404 page. We want to have a privacy policy. We want to have terms and conditions.
Those are some more base pages that Google is looking for. This is actually proven that Google sees you as more legit if you have something like a privacy policy and terms and conditions.
And that’s not just if you’re a big software company. That’s literally any company. You can generate one of those in like one minute with ChatGPT. So that’s not a big deal. Just make an extra page, privacy dash policy, and then make that page.
Money Pages (This Is Where You Actually Rank)
Beyond that, pages that I recommend every pest control company set up, and we can get into complex architecture and structure within the site, but something I really like to hone in on and focus on is what are called money pages, or as a lot of people might know, location pages or location service pages.
These are going to be the pages that are actually optimized for your top keywords.
Your top keywords might be, I live in Chicago, so that might be Pest Control Chicago, or the cities nearby, that might be Pest Control Glenview, Pest Control Evanston, Pest Control Northbrook, all of those different cities combined with all those services. Those are the keywords that you want to show up for.
All of those top keywords that you want to show up for, we should have a page that is dedicated to them.
Now, you don’t have to go too crazy with this. There is a certain threshold. Really the way to think of this is one concept per page.
I get this from Cal Roof. He’s one of the top people in on-page SEO. I interviewed him a while ago on my show. One concept per page.
For instance, if we take a group of keywords, let’s say pest control Chicago, Chicago pest control, Chicago exterminators, Chicago pest control services, that’s all the same page because that’s all basically the same thing.
But if we switch the city, pest control Chicago versus pest control Northbrook, that’s actually different. Pest control in Chicago is different from pest control in Northbrook.
So the top cities that you serve, you should have a page dedicated to each of those so that you can tell Google, “Hey, we serve these areas and we want to show up in these areas.”
When someone does a Google search, it will show that page because Google is looking for ideally an exact match result.
Blog Pages and Pest Libraries
We should definitely have a blog page and ideally that acts as almost a category page. So it’ll be like xyzpestcontrol.com slash blog and then slash and then you’ll have all your blogs there.
Don’t make the mistake of having all of your blogs just your website slash and then the URL. The blogs should all be in their own dedicated category.
Some other pages you might want to have, and ones that we typically recommend, would be maybe a pest library. You’ll see a lot of companies do this and you could consider it overkill. I wouldn’t say it’s a requirement, but this is really good for building what’s called topical relevance.
It’s not so much like we’re ranking these pages and it’s going to totally drive our SEO, but it’s more so just informing search engines, having a good amount of pages on our site saying, “Hey, we’re talking all about ants and we’re talking all about mosquitoes. We are the authority on this topic.”
Just like we’re doing here, talking about all the different things regarding pest control marketing and repurposing that into a site that is showing authority. Talking about all the different bugs, “Hey, we’re pest control experts. We know all about bed bugs. We know all about termites.”
That’s something to consider as well.
The Biggest Setup Mistakes I See
There are so many different setup mistakes. It’s ridiculous.
I like to preface this with, I see the elements of Google in four components really, and that would be, in order in terms of ranking, your local service ads, Google ads, Google business profile, and website.
Local service ads and Google business profile are pretty easy. They’re relatively easy. Website and Google ads are kind of a nightmare, especially your website.
There’s so much that goes on there. It is really a complete mess. If anyone’s ever tried to go into WordPress, you have no idea what you’re doing.
One of my friends runs his dad’s construction company. He logged into WordPress for the first time ever and he was like, “Dude, what is this? This is a lot. I have no idea what to do.”
It’s really confusing. It’s hard to go into something like WordPress for the first time, which is usually the main development tool.
Mistake #1: Not Optimizing Your Homepage for Your Brand
One big one that I usually recommend is that we should optimize the homepage for the brand.
Like I told you, how you should do SEO is you create tons of different pages on all the concepts that you want to cover and that’s one concept per page.
You shouldn’t do several pages on the exact same thing because that’s considered duplicate content and Google’s either going to take one of those pages down or it might take both of them down. Overall, you’re just going to be deemed less trustworthy in Google’s eyes.
Why are you creating all this duplicate content? Are you a spammer? With all the AI stuff, are you just generating all these pages and duplicating them? What are you doing?
Regarding the one topic or one concept per page, your homepage, a lot of people like to optimize it for different keywords, but you should be optimizing your other pages for keywords and let’s optimize the homepage for your brand.
Your homepage, the H1, the title tag, throughout the page, the different headers, in the text and such, we should be mentioning the brand name over and over to ensure when people are searching up our company that our homepage shows up first.
That’s the thing that we’re going to spend a lot of time on. A lot of people are going to land there.
Mistake #2: Terrible Page Speed
Another pretty common mistake that I see with pest control websites is page speed.
A lot of companies, this is hit or miss. I see some companies just randomly crush this and then other companies completely drop the ball.
I do a PageSpeed Insights search, which is free. You can go to PageSpeed.web.dev or something. You can just search PageSpeed Insights.
This is a free Google tool that you can analyze any site and even any page within your site. You can do this for every single page on your site if you want to.
With a lot of websites you see, and by the way, with this report, it will split it into mobile and desktop. The mobile score will always be worse. Mobile just happens to perform much worse, maybe two to three times worse.
You might see that your mobile score, a pretty healthy one is mobile takes about three seconds to load and then your desktop takes about one second to load. That’s kind of standard, not necessarily optimal, but that’s something we should at least initially shoot for.
But some companies that I look at, their homepage, some of the most important pages on their site are taking 10 seconds to load. 20 seconds to load.
When you think about your target market, when you think about people landing on your site and maybe they came from a referral or whatever source, are they going to wait 10 seconds for your page to load? Are they going to sit there?
At least the first one we want to look at is the first contentful paint, meaning how long does it take for the first initial load of the page or the first initial piece of content of the page that is visible to load.
If that’s taking more than 10 seconds, really it shouldn’t be taking any more than three to four seconds. Because people naturally drop off after all that time, and especially now that people have the attention span of a goldfish.
Literally, I think people actually have a worse attention span than a goldfish. I’m pretty sure goldfish have an attention span of eight seconds, and we have an attention span of seven seconds on average, which is nuts.
You think that someone is going to wait all of that time to let your site load and there’s so many competitors out there. It’s not like you’re just in a market of one and you’re just selling a hot dog stand outside of a college of hungry people.
No, there are tons of pest control companies out there. You have so much competition, so you need to make sure that you get that leg up. And that’s a really easy one that’s also fairly early in the funnel that most people don’t cover.
The Best Hosting and Tools to Use
We want to be built on WordPress. About 50% of the internet is built on WordPress, might be 42% or something. Most of the internet is built on WordPress.
Our actual domain hosting provider, our hosting provider, would be WP Engine. That’s a really strong one.
Outside of that, something that we should also have set up for our company is Cloudflare. A lot of companies don’t have this in place, but this not only helps site security, which is what it’s more known for, but that also helps with page speed.
We want to make sure that we have Cloudflare set up. We want to make sure that we’re using WP Engine and that we’re using WordPress.
The Plugins You Need
Within WordPress, there’s also a good amount we can do regarding optimization in plugins.
Cloudflare will do a good amount. WP Engine will definitely help. But the final straw here will be using some kind of SEO plugins.
First off, we have to have some kind of core SEO plugin. A pretty standard free one is Yoast SEO. So if you don’t have any, then you should definitely have that one set up.
For my agency and what we use for our clients, we like to use Rank Math. It’s a little bit more expensive, it’s a little bit more complex, but we like that more and there are page speed tools that we can do within that.
Then there are some other tools that we can use such as WP Rocket that also helps with page speed.
We should also have specifically one image optimization tool. There are plenty out there, it doesn’t really matter. There’s one connected directly to WP Rocket, so we usually just use that one.
There should be a dedicated image compressing plugin within your site because the images are usually what takes a lot of the load speed or really what increases the load speed the most.
You have these huge images and they might be marked as a 5,000 by 5,000 picture and you can show it as a 100 by 100 and it looks the same. Quality might be a tiny bit worse, but no one can even really tell except it makes the page way faster.
We need the page speed plugin and we also need some kind of image compressing plugin.
Why Mobile Optimization Is Critical
There’s this key split between mobile and desktop and mobile, depending on who you hear from, mobile is about 60 to 70% of searches. That means that desktop would be about 30 to 40% of searches.
There are definitely more people searching on mobile than desktop. So that is why we want to optimize for mobile.
Regarding the page speed, the page speed on mobile is always going to be slower. I’ve never seen a scenario where this isn’t the case unless the site is broken or something.
We want to make sure that we optimize for the mobile page speed and then that naturally takes care of the desktop page speed.
Mobile is incredibly important. More searches than not are searching on mobile. So let’s optimize for that first and then that naturally takes care of desktop.
How to Structure Your Pest Control Site for Maximum SEO
This might be a little bit too complex for the average pest control owner, so I won’t jump too deep into this.
But typically how the site should be built out is you demonstrate categories.
Ideally, if you are structuring the site the right way, then you should have a category page for termite control, really all the main services that you provide to demonstrate to Google clearly what you do, who you guys are.
A page for termite control, for ant control, for mosquito control, for spider control, all these different pages. That acts as a category page.
Then we have a page beyond that. That could either then be turned into a location page and that could be slash termite control slash Chicago, or we could do slash termite control slash and then the termites that we serve.
Usually the way we like to structure it, because there are a bunch of different ways, but typically the way we like to do it is doing our location pages that way.
We have the general service pages, which again, slash termite control, slash ant control, slash spider control, whatever. And then we have the locations after that.
So slash termite dash control slash Chicago dash IL. That is our termite control Chicago page on our site.
That goes for some other pages as well, like your pest library. For the pest library, that would be xyzpestcontrol.com slash pest dash library slash ants, slash spiders, slash termites.
All the different pests that you serve. This shows to Google very clearly, okay, you have a library of all the things that you provide versus just every page on the site is directly connected to the domain.
When you demonstrate categories, it also shows depth of concept that, “Hey, we know all about termite control and we have a page for that, but we also have pages within that because we have so much expertise within the termite control category and within the ant control category and these other things.”
Internal Linking Matters
Another thing, probably the last thing I’ll mention here regarding structure is internal linking.
Internal linking also plays into the structure. First we need to build out and really identify what categories we want to have and how we want to build out the site.
It really should be that we have our homepage up here and that we have different category pages here and then there might be pages within that and then maybe even pages within those pages.
What we want to do from there is then start interlinking these pages.
When you have a top level category page connected, let’s say we have just a general pest control page, and then under that, within that category, we have Chicago, Illinois, we have Northbrook, Illinois, we have Glendale, Illinois.
Those pages, the ones connecting to the category should all be linking to each other. So Chicago, Illinois should be linking to pest control and that should be linking back to that to demonstrate even more clearly the architecture.
I know that’s super complex. A lot of people don’t understand that, but at least just to kind of grasp that of maybe you’re building a new website, just something to consider of talking to your developer. Are we structuring the site right? Are we doing what I’m saying here?
Why This Actually Matters for Your Business
Years ago, I wasn’t putting enough emphasis on my website. And just coming from my perspective, this does matter because ultimately it ranks you higher and you’re going to get more calls.
For everyone reading this, you want more calls, you want more business. And that’s why this is important.
This is one of the integral pieces to making the business successful, making the brand look professional and premium.
I know for a lot of people it can be a little overwhelming, but watch this a few times if you have to because it is very, very important for your business and to really get dialed in so you can get more business, more calls, and be more successful in your pest control company.
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Your website is your digital storefront. Make it count.
