Most pest control companies waste months chasing the wrong keywords.
They spend all their time trying to rank for “how to get rid of spiders” when they should be laser-focused on the keywords that actually convert into paying customers.
I run Pest Control SEO, and I’ve helped dozens of pest control companies fix this exact mistake. Let me show you exactly which keywords matter and how to prioritize them.
The Top Keywords Customers Actually Use
There’s a lot I could say here, but I’ll start very generally.
First off, it does depend on the area because people will typically look up geographically relevant keywords. That might be Pest Control Chicago or Pest Control Glenview or Pest Control Evanston.
So the first thing I’ll say is that a really common one is pest control plus city name, whatever city you’re in.
And by the way, that’s actually exact.
How Keywords Actually Work (The Nuance Matters)
For people that don’t understand exactly how keywords work, every little slight nuance within a phrase is a different keyword.
Pest Control Chicago is a different keyword than Chicago Pest Control. It’s a different keyword than Chicago Exterminators. Different than Pest Control Chicago except there’s no space between the pest and control.
That’s how nuanced they get. You don’t have to account for people misspelling, but just understand that that happens and those get identified as each individual keyword.
So that’s the main one. What I’m saying is that that is essentially the exact search phrase.
We see pest control Chicago always more times than Chicago pest control. We see pest control Houston more times than Houston pest control 9/10 times.
The differentiating doesn’t make too much of a difference, but for Chicago pest control, I actually mentioned this in my book–The Complete Guide To Pest Control SEO.
Pest Control Chicago has about 1,000 searches a month. And then Chicago Pest Control has about 400 searches a month.
That is a big difference.
So ideally, let’s optimize for that main keyword, assuming that there isn’t too much keyword difficulty, which you can see in a tool like SEMrush.
It’ll show you the keyword difficulty and it’ll give you a percentage. Between these different keywords, it was basically the same. Pest Control Chicago is about 35%, maybe Chicago Pest Control was 37%.
Ideally we want to optimize for that top keyword.
That’s a really easy one. And like I was saying in a previous video, we’re making pages for those keywords across the cities that we serve.
The Other High-Volume Keywords
Then there are some more general ones that we can very clearly see.
That might be:
- Pest control near me
- Pest control
- Exterminator near me
- Pest exterminators near me (actually pretty common, believe it or not)
Then maybe some other services with near me. There’s maybe wildlife removal near me, termite control near me, pest control services.
But really the top two by far are pest control near me and pest control. Those are just the most basic ones.
Everyone’s searching, at least as of now, because people might have more advanced searches in the future with all the AI stuff, searching on ChatGPT and now Google’s AI mode. So that might change in the future.
But overall, those are the general keywords we can expect customers to search when they are in a transactional state.
How to Identify High Intent Keywords
There’s a difference, right? Because there’s a funnel of keywords.
There’s top of funnel keywords, there’s middle of funnel keywords, there’s bottom of funnel keywords.
A lot of companies will spend all of their time focusing on top of funnel keywords and just ranking on raccoon removal, except there’s no geo-targeting. And geo-targeting means you’re involving the city in some way.
We just want to rank on “how to get rid of spiders.” And that’s okay. We can still do that. But like I’ve said before, and like I’ve said many times, let’s first focus on the bottom of funnel keywords.
Those would be the ones like pest control Chicago, pest control near me. Those are all the people that are actually trying to convert. They want to find a company.
When we’re talking about SEO, SEO is a lead generation strategy at the end of the day.
A lot of people are like, “Oh, I got my traffic up. I got my backlinks up. I got this and that, all these crazy statistics.”
But it’s like, well, did we get more leads from SEO or not?
That comes from setting up these money pages and targeting these bottom of funnel keywords.
Don’t Ignore Top of Funnel, But Always Geo-Modify
Those ones I was just mentioning, those are the bottom of funnel ones. Obviously we can have higher top of funnel ones that will generate traffic and they will generate some brand recognition.
But typically, I recommend always somewhat geo-modifying your content, always having some kind of local perspective.
Even some of the pest pages we set up, instead of setting up a page for ants, we’ll set up a page for ants in Arizona.
At least we don’t serve all of Arizona, maybe we serve half of Arizona, but still at least we rank on that term actually because it’s easier than just ants. And people across Arizona, maybe it’s a one in two, one in four chance that they actually can use our services, but they’re still more middle funnel. Now they know our company.
The Tools I Use to Find Keywords for Pest Control
My favorite SEO tool is SEMrush. SEMrush is basically the all in one. I think they have over 55 tools within the platform.
Now it is fairly expensive. I think it’s $140 a month right now. So that might be through an agency or that might be through some kind of partner. Obviously I set up all the SEMrush campaigns for my clients. They don’t set that up.
You might want some kind of agency to set that up, some kind of partner. But SEMrush is a really great overall SEO tool. It basically covers everything.
You can do keyword research. You can see your domain authority. You can see how much traffic you’re getting.
Another great part of that is that you can also connect that to your Google Search Console and your Google Analytics so that all of that speculative third-party data is now also combined with the Google data.
SEMrush is a great one for keywords.
Understanding Intent Through Data
Going a little bit further on the keywords and understanding the intent, part of that’s intuitive just to know that if someone searches Pest Control Chicago, they’re probably looking to convert.
But you can also see this through SEMrush. They show different levels of intent whenever you’re searching for keywords.
You can even do some searches for free. I think it gives you 10 searches a day for free and it will be limited, but that’s something.
You can see it will give you the intent category and it will show a T for transactional or an I for informational or these other categories that are provided.
We want to optimize for the T transactional ones first because those are the ones we’re going to make money on.
The Free Tools You Should Use
You should definitely have Google Analytics and Google Search Console set up. Those are actual Google tools and actual Google data that’s either connected to your site or to your domain, which is giving you the real data with what’s going on.
Honestly, I wouldn’t say that’s enough, but it’s a really good starting point.
If you have a good amount of data and assuming those are already set up and maybe you’ve had them set up for a few months or even a few years, then you can go into those platforms and see.
It’ll show you in your Google Search Console, how many impressions are you getting for the search? Okay, last month we got 10,000 impressions, this month we got 50,000 impressions, which isn’t too crazy because that just means your search showed up on the page, no one actually clicked.
But okay, last month we got 50 clicks and this month we got 100 clicks. Wow, I can see that.
Google Search Console will show you all of the different keywords that you got traffic for.
Everyone’s talking about SEMrush because that’s my favorite and there’s these different SEO tools, but you can use Google Analytics and Google Search Console and get a good amount out of those.
The Stupidly Simple Free Tool Everyone Ignores
Besides that, another one I like to mention is almost cliche or kind of stupid, but literally just use Google search.
Just search on the platform. Ideally you log out of your Google account and you do it from a private browser.
Search some of your top keywords and see what shows up.
Instead of going through all the tools like I do, because I already look at these other things, actually just do a search for your top keywords and see what shows up.
Is it your top competitor? Is it Yelp? Is it whoever? Is it mostly Google Ads? Is it mostly local service ads?
I encourage every pest control owner to do this. See what is showing up on your top searches.
Is it one of your biggest competitors? You’re like, “Oh wow, this website page is ranking, I could do way better than that.”
Versus, “Wow, okay, it’s Orkin, they’re totally crushing it, this page is to the max, they have tons of links to it, it’s over, we probably can’t rank on this term.”
I would say those are my top three free tools.
How to Group and Prioritize Keywords
We can track those within a SEMrush project and we can actually just really bulk those all together. We don’t need to go too crazy with grouping.
Something relating to that is I will set up a master spreadsheet for all of my clients and we will have essentially columns and categories for, okay, here are all of the top keywords for Chicago. Here are all the top keywords for Northbrook. Here are all the top keywords for Glenview.
We can see those all laid out very clearly. It’s like, wow, okay, there are tons of different pest control searches in Chicago.
Seeing that we should have one concept per page. If it’s pest control Chicago, Chicago exterminators, and all these different terms are basically the same, we shouldn’t make different pages for those.
Instead on that one page, optimize for all of those different keywords on that one page, which means putting them in different headings and having those keywords just throughout the page so that we can rank on that.
That’s essentially how I do the grouping.
The Prioritization Strategy That Actually Works
Like I already mentioned with the prioritization, we should always start with the bottom of funnel, not the top of funnel.
Let’s always get those easy ones ranking.
Really something also that you should focus on is when you look at a tool like SEMrush and you see maybe one of those bottom of funnel money pages is ranking like number three.
That’s what you need to be focusing on.
It’s really hard to create a page from scratch. Google has to crawl it. It has to index it. It then ranks it. Then you’re ranking like 40 and then you continue to maybe climb up the ranks. Then you’re 30 and then you’re 20.
When you start, if you already have a page ranking three or five or four, definitely anything top 10, definitely focus on those first because those are going to be much easier to rank.
The clicks drastically drop from one to 10. One’s going to get maybe 30% of the clicks and then it will drop about half each time. So it’ll be like 30%, then 15%, then 7%.
Now if you’re ranking number five, you’re getting a few percent of clicks.
Those top results are really important. So let’s focus on the keywords that are already doing pretty well. We just need a little bit of a boost there.
The Bottom Line for Pest Control Keywords
You need to focus on bottom of funnel keywords. That’s where you’re actually going to make your money with SEO.
Specifically look at the ones that are already doing well. You can do that through free tools like Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and a free Google search.
Or if you are looking to be more of an SEO pro, if you really want to take it to the next level, then use a tool like SEMrush and you can either go through my course or just figure it out on your own and master that there.
Stop chasing informational keywords that might get you traffic but won’t get you customers. Focus on the transactional, bottom of funnel keywords that actually convert.
If you want to learn more strategies like this, join our free Facebook group, Pest Control Millionaires. We’ve got over 2,000 active members sharing what’s working in their businesses right now.
And if you want the complete blueprint for dominating your local market through SEO and everything else, grab a copy of Zip Code Kings. It’s the pest control marketing bible.
Go after the keywords that make money.
