Search engines stopped matching strings of text a long time ago. They work out what a page is about, which means the useful question is no longer which phrase to repeat but how much of a subject you have actually covered.
Coverage, not phrasing
A page can mention water heater replacement a dozen times and still be a thin page about water heater replacement. Another can mention it three times, and also explain what the job costs, how long it takes, what size is needed, what happens to the old unit, and when a repair is the better option, and be recognisably the more complete answer.
The second page has done the thing that matters: it addresses the questions that surround the subject. That is what is meant by understanding meaning rather than matching words, and the practical instruction it produces is to write about the whole job rather than around a phrase.
Which words to use is a separate question, covered in saying what you do in the words customers use. This is about how much ground the page covers.
What surrounds a job, for a trade
The questions cluster predictably, and a page missing several of them is incomplete regardless of length:
- What it costs, or what makes it vary.
- How long it takes, and how much disruption.
- How to know you need it, the symptoms.
- Repair or replace, which is the question behind most expensive jobs.
- What is involved, step by step.
- What can go wrong, and what a good job looks like.
- What you need from the customer: access, decisions, preparation.
Answer those and the page is thorough in the way that counts. Miss the awkward ones: cost, and what can go wrong, and it reads as a brochure, which both readers and search engines are good at recognising.
One subject per page
The corollary. If a page covers water heaters, boilers and underfloor heating equally, it is not clearly about any of them, and it competes with your own pages that are.
Give each job its own page and let each cover its subject completely. That is also, from a different direction, the structural argument in how many pages a contractor site needs.
Why this matters more now
Answers are increasingly assembled rather than listed: a summary at the top of the results, or an assistant replying in sentences. Whatever is doing the assembling has to understand a page well enough to draw on it.
A page that clearly covers one job thoroughly, in plain language, with the awkward questions answered, is a page that can be drawn on. A page circling a phrase is not, and that gap widens as more answering is done for the reader.
Frequently asked questions
What is semantic SEO?
Writing so a page is understood to be about a subject, rather than matching a phrase. In practice it means covering the questions that surround a job instead of repeating its name.
Do keywords still matter?
The words customers use matter, because they have to appear somewhere. What no longer matters is how many times they appear.
How do I know if a page covers a topic properly?
Check it against the questions a customer asks on the phone: cost, duration, symptoms, repair or replace, what is involved, what can go wrong. Missing the cost question is the usual gap.
Should one page cover several services?
No. A page covering three jobs equally is clearly about none of them and competes with your own more specific pages.
Where to start
Take your most valuable service page and list the questions a customer asks before booking that job. Every one the page does not answer is a gap, and the ones about price and risk are usually the missing ones.
Real Time Marketing has worked with home service contractors since 2016: plumbing, HVAC, roofing, electrical and other trades, nationwide, from our office in Bradenton, Florida. Agreements are month-to-month. See our search optimisation or book a strategy call.