Most pest control websites are optimized completely wrong.
They’re missing critical on-page elements, their internal linking is a mess, and they’re using stock images that kill their credibility with Google.
I run Pest Control SEO, and I’ve audited hundreds of pest control websites. The mistakes are consistent and they’re costing you rankings. Let me show you exactly what matters for on-page SEO.
The Three Pillars of SEO (Know the Difference)
First, I’d like to distinguish the three different pillars of SEO, which would be on-page SEO, technical SEO, and off-page SEO.
On-Page SEO
On-page SEO is optimizing the individual pages on your site. You might be optimizing the headings, you might be putting different images on individual pages and such. That is on-page SEO and that’s what we’re covering here.
Off-Page SEO
Off-page SEO is what is completely off the site. That might be backlinks, that might be reviews. You could even consider things like social media, getting followers, getting engagement and likes and such. That is all off-page because it is completely off the website.
Technical SEO
Then we have technical SEO, which is part of the site, but it’s essentially items that you can optimize across the site. Things like page speed. Page speed, you might use a plugin or something similar and you’re optimizing the speed across the site. So that will usually come from plugins and that kind of thing.
The 4 Critical Places Your Keywords Must Appear
With on-page, we’re mainly going to be talking about those location pages, the money pages, things like a Pest Control Chicago page.
There are four main places that you want to have any given keyword that you want to optimize a page for. And that will be your H1, your title, your text, and your URL.
All of those four. Let me explain those briefly.
1. Your URL
The URL is what’s actually in the domain search or you’ll see this in the search bar. That might be xyzpestcontrol.com slash pest dash control dash Chicago.
That is a ranking factor there that Google is looking at. What does the URL say? Okay, it says Pest Control Chicago. The page is probably about Pest Control Chicago.
2. Your H1
Another component of that is your H1. The H1 is usually the top heading of the page. It’s usually bigger than all of the other ones, but it’s not so much about the visual component. It’s about how Google is actually reading the page.
It’s the same way you might think of a high school essay, a college essay, whatever, that you have your main heading and that’s actually the title of your essay or whatever the piece of content you’re making.
Then you’ll have secondary headings, which will be H2s. And those are the secondary topics. And then you might have H3s and maybe even H4s that are within those.
The H1 is by far the most important, that’s at the top of the page. Then we have the H2s, which are second most important, and then H3s and so on, and they get less and less important.
The H1 is the main one that we want to optimize for. The main keyword that we want to optimize for should be in the H1, should be in the URL.
3. Your Text
The next one would just be having it somewhere on the page. Somewhere in the text, in the paragraphs, that exact keyword should be mentioned.
I’ve been emphasizing optimizing for one keyword, but we can actually optimize one page for many keywords. So those secondary keywords that might not have as much traffic or might be a little bit more difficult, we can include those across the page as well.
That can still at least get us a chance at ranking for those and getting some traffic from those.
4. Your Title Tag
The last one is the title tag.
This is something that you’re not necessarily going to see. It’s technically part of the metadata. This is more so just to communicate with search engines.
Actually part of it is to communicate with search engines. But another part of it is what will show up on the actual Google search results.
When you do a search for something like Pest Control Chicago, and then you see all the different websites that are listed, you might see Yelp, you might see Orkin, you might see whoever. That title that you’ll see with a description under it, that is the title, the title tag, and then there’s the meta description under that.
We really want to make sure that our main keyword is in those four places, and then we can kind of go from there.
Why Internal Linking Is Critical (And How to Do It Right)
This is one that very few people get right. This is a pretty tough one.
What Is Internal Linking?
Internal linking is linking from one page on your site, which I’ve already explained that your website is a collection of web pages, it’s not just one thing, but there’s many different pages on the site.
Internal linking is linking from one page on your site to another page on your site.
Then there’s the other end of that, which is external linking. External linking is linking from one page on your site to one page on another person’s site. That’s technically a backlink, by the way.
Why It Matters So Much
Internal linking is so important because this gives Google and ultimately search engines and large language models like ChatGPT context and relevance of what the page is about.
Again, this is all about informing, teaching, coaching the platform, let’s say Google, of what the page is about.
If you have a page, let’s say I keep mentioning Pest Control Chicago. Let’s say you have the Pest Control Chicago page.
To establish some relevance there, to show Google somewhat what the page is about or things that are related to it, because Google learns just like humans. Humans learn through association.
“Okay, I understand Pest Control Chicago because I’m very familiar with Pest Control Northbrook. I know nothing about Chicago, but I know everything about Northbrook. Okay, Chicago is close to Northbrook. Okay, I can make the association. They’re pretty similar.”
That’s essentially how Google works. Google actually works just like the human brain.
This internal linking shows a relationship and relevance between these pages.
How to Actually Do It
Ideally, and some people go overboard with this, you shouldn’t go too crazy, but you should have a few internal links on each of the pages on your website that are super relevant to other pages on your website.
That Pest Control Chicago page should probably link to the Pest Control Northbrook page and the Pest Control Glenview page and so forth.
Actually those kind of act as mini backlinks. This is a pretty easy strategy that you can use and it’s something you do yourself.
Backlinks or external links from other people is something you really have to fight for. You might have to pay for them. You’ll have to do some outreach, maybe you can get some from your friends, but they’re pretty tough to acquire.
Versus internal links can work really well. And that’s something you do. So we obviously want to work on the things that we can optimize for first.
The Gemini Trick for Finding Internal Linking Opportunities
A pretty cool trick here, most people don’t know this, my mentor Dennis Yu showed me, is that you can go on Google’s Gemini, which is their ChatGPT equivalent.
A lot of people, most people use ChatGPT, but there is a reason for using Gemini, and that’s because they are linked to Google. It is a Google product, so they can pull directly from all of the websites that are listed on Google.
Versus ChatGPT can, but not to that extent and not to crawling every single page. Google has all of it. ChatGPT maybe has 50% of it. That’s just a rough estimate.
What you can do on the Gemini tool is you can give it your domain and ask, “What are some of the top internal linking opportunities on this site?”
Because Google can see all the different pages on the site. You might have 100 different pages on the site.
My mentor Dennis did this. He did it for his Blitz Metrics site. He was like, “Yeah, I want to do some internal linking for the blog post that we’ve made about Danny Leibrandt.”
And it found all of the different Danny Leibrandt pages and then linked them to each other to establish that relevance. And then that powers up all of those different pages.
That’s something really powerful you can do, and that wasn’t something that was possible even a couple years ago.
How Images and Videos Impact SEO
I don’t think about them too much from the SEO perspective. I think of them more from a conversion perspective.
No one really wants to land on a blank page. Maybe if someone’s just doing a ChatGPT search and ChatGPT can see all of the text on the page, maybe that works, but it is more from a conversion component.
But I will still give a caveat to that. I’ve explained that Google is looking for E-E-A-T, which is their search quality rater guidelines. And they are based upon that E-E-A-T, which is experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness.
When we’re talking about experience, how can you demonstrate experience? That will be a lot through photos and videos.
There’s not a direct ranking factor there, but overall that satisfies Google’s guidelines and overall what they’re looking to see.
We love to have a few unique photos on every single website page and even videos.
I understand pest control owners are busy. They don’t like taking videos. So I don’t even get into that too much.
Never Use Stock Images or AI Images
You should never use stock images and you should never use AI images because again, we want to demonstrate E-E-A-T.
People and Google want to see real content. Actually you doing the service. Okay, you say that you do bed bug control, let’s actually see it.
That’s what customers are asking too. Customers don’t want to see random stock art or random AI generated image. Even if the AI generated image is supposedly one of your technicians that has your uniform, it should be a real actual image that you guys have taken.
No, you really should never use those.
How to Optimize Images (Keep It Simple)
I don’t like the crazy optimization stuff that people do on images. There’s not too much to do there.
Overall, just in the alt text, which is essentially explaining to search engines what the image is about, go into the alt text and literally just say what the image is about.
Then maybe you can sometimes put a keyword in there. It depends. If it’s a Pest Control Chicago page, then we will put, “Hey, this is Steve doing termite control in Chicago.”
And then that plays, but you don’t want to crazy over optimize. You actually do want to explain what the image is about.
The Tools That Actually Measure On-Page Optimization
For on-page, you can use a tool like Page Optimizer Pro that is also known as POP. That’s Kyle Roof’s tool, which I mentioned before. If you really want to go crazy on on-page stuff, then that’s the one to use.
But overall, I think you’re just good using SEMrush, kind of just a general SEO tool.
The Free Chrome Extension You Need
Something else that I like to use as an on-page tool, which is free, this is a Chrome extension called Meta SEO Inspector.
You install this free Chrome plugin. By the way, there’s many plugins like this. Mine is one of the worst looking ones. I got it a while ago. So now different people have come out with better tools, but this is still the one I’ve been using for a while and obviously it works.
Using this tool, you can see all of the metadata across the page. So mainly what you’re looking at is the title tag, the meta description, and then the headings throughout the page.
This is really important because the headings on your page, really the way I view it, is how you’re communicating to Google and these other potentially large language models of what the page is about.
I’ve seen people that have headings all over the place. Really you just have to check this for yourself.
Ideally, you go and get this free Chrome extension Meta SEO Inspector and use it for some of the top pages on your site.
You’ll be surprised to see, “Oh wow, looking at these headings, how would Google have any idea what this page is about?”
There’s no question why this page wouldn’t rank. Obviously it’s not ranking because number one, the headings don’t convey what the page is about at all.
That’s something really easy to see as well. And that’s arguably one of the main on-page components.
Let’s make sure that all the headings on the page clearly demonstrate what we’re talking about and are SEO optimized for our primary keyword first, which would be, again, in the title tag, the H1, the URL, but then some of those secondary keywords we can have in those H2s and throughout the text.
The Bottom Line for Pest Control Website SEO
Website SEO for pest control isn’t complicated, but it has to be done right.
Make sure your primary keyword appears in those four critical places: URL, H1, title tag, and text.
Use internal linking to show Google the relationships between your pages. And use real photos, not stock images or AI.
Check your pages with Meta SEO Inspector and you’ll probably be shocked at what you find.
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Get your on-page dialed in. It’s the foundation everything else builds on.
