Basically no one is using SEO in Kingwood! (But if you do, you've got a huge advantage)
by Jess Fields, President, Precision Outreach – July 12, 2023
If you own and operate a business in Kingwood, you might be interested in Search Engine Optimization, or SEO. Heck, everyone is! But do you really need it?
As someone who grew up in Kingwood and graduated from Kingwood High School, not only do I contend that you need it, but that you probably need it a lot more than the typical “urban Houston” businesses that hire us. We happen to run a Kingwood SEO company and provide the best SEO services in Kingwood, but whoever you use, I feel confident you’ll see the value of doing it by the end of this article.
(By the way – if you’re reading this, you were almost certainly referred to us by Google. The reason is that we used SEO to help you find us!)
Kingwood’s changed from when I was a kid
Most of my childhood, from Kindergarten on, was spent in Kingwood. I fondly remember riding my bike through the greenbelts, going on long runs with the track team at Kingwood Middle School, and playing on the high school golf team for KHS (although I was not a great golfer). In the “old days” of the 1980s and 1990s, Kingwood was functionally a bedroom community where people commuted to and from areas such as downtown Houston.
That has changed, of course. While Kingwood is still a bedroom community to a certain extent, in some respects it is more isolated than ever from “the rest” of the Houston area (ironic, since Kingwood was annexed into Houston in the 90s).
Growth in population, both in Kingwood neighboring New Caney/Porter to the north and Humble/Atascocita to the south, means that Kingwood is no longer “way out there.” In fact, Kingwood is now much closer to downtown Houston than virtually all of the growth communities on the 59 corridor (who saw THAT coming?).
That, in turn, has led to an explosion of services in Kingwood versus, say, 20 years ago. Kingwood now has both a really nice HEB and Kroger that each anchor huge developments (remember when it was just Randall’s?). The HEB center has taken Town Center and blown it up into a full-blown dining and shopping destination, while the Kroger has been the lynchpin of an explosion of growth at Highway 59 and Northpark Drive.
Kingwood residents used to go to Humble for “local” shopping, but no more – now they stay in Kingwood. That’s great for Kingwood residents, but a mixed bag for Kingwood businesses.
The downside of localized services in Kingwood
Localization rhymes with isolation, and that’s the downside. Kingwood residents are indeed pleased with more local services, but those local businesses are put in a challenging position.
In order to survive, they have to serve the local market in Kingwood. In order to thrive, they need to grab as much of the Kingwood market as possible. To really grow and scale, however, they need to grow beyond Kingwood.
For instance, I know of several extremely fine restaurants in Kingwood that could have, and deserve to have, a much broader audience beyond Kingwood. They should attract patrons from farther – even inside the loop, or the Woodlands, or further still. Generally, though, they don’t.
However, the truth is that many Kingwood businesses even struggle to capture the local market, much less attract patrons from abroad into the King’s Forest. This is most certainly a problem. The root cause is easy enough to diagnose: people are moving in and out of Kingwood like never before. There’s a dynamism to the population that used to not exist when Kingwood was self-styled as a “sleepy” bedroom community.
This affects everything from the aforementioned restaurants, to realtors, to home services, and everything in between.
What the data shows me, though, is that even local Kingwood businesses aren’t doing much to try and capture local Kingwood customers.
SEO: Kingwood businesses’ unused weapon
You can judge a lot by Google search terms, and here’s something we can judge about how marketing’s going in Kingwood (or not going). Based on Google searches, very few businesses are utilizing SEO effectively. That means, by the way, that you can get a huge jump on the competition by utilizing it!
In case you’re asking “what’s SEO?” Briefly, if you want to rank on Google, which you should, you use SEO, or Search Engine Optimization. Here’s why: if you’re in the top 3 results on a Google search, you’re getting 75% or more of the click-throughs for that search. In other words, if you’re not ranking, you’re leaving money on the table.
Back to the assertion I made earlier, how do I know that businesses in Kingwood are not using SEO? I’ll prove it to you with a variety of search terms that are not competitive, and what kind of money’s not being made by businesses in those industries. I will not, however, reveal the exact search terms – because if you’re reading this and you’re in that line of business, I don’t want to compromise our ability to help you.
Kingwood SEO for plumbers: nonexistent!
Not only are plumbers the people who saved the universe from being taken over by Bowser, they’re also incredibly valuable home services. Plumbing fits into a category like so many home services where when you need it, you usually really need it. That’s why ranking high on Google is so important – it replaces the old look-through-the-yellow-pages activity with a quick online search.
If you’re a plumber in Kingwood, and you’re not doing SEO, you’re probably leaving a ton of money out there for competitors. And if you’re not a plumber, take note of these figures. They’re likely more significant for your business.
Here’s the metrics for plumbing in Kingwood…
Total number of keywords (Google search terms) related to finding a plumber in Kingwood: 87
Total monthly volume of searches for a plumber in Kingwood: estimated at 880 per month or 10,560 per year
Average difficulty of ranking for those keywords (score out of 100, with 100 being most difficult): 15%
Average all-cause cost to hire a plumber, according to BobVila.com: $331
Using that figure, average estimated value of these Google searches if we assume that only one-fourth of the searches are high-intent, ready to buy (which is extremely conservative and does not consider high-price outlier jobs, etc): $72,280 per month
Plumber search keywords in Kingwood
This little chart is part of a broader spreadsheet showing all of the search terms related to plumbers in Kingwood.
The number on the left is the volume of searches per month – as you can see, the top two search terms looking for a plumber in Kingwood combine for about 500 searches per month! It’s fair to say that if you’re a plumber, there’s some money to be made there.
The number next to the little colored circle is a measure of keyword difficulty – anything under 30% is considered to be fairly easy to rank for. They’re all easy, as you can see – to be honest, I was a bit surprised by this. There are some big plumbing companies in the area who spend a lot on advertising… just not, apparently, on winning customers actually looking for them.
There’s another metric not shown here that’s worth mentioning: Cost Per Click, or CPC. Basically: how much would it cost to run an ad for this search term? For each of these, it’s about $28 per click… yikes.
$72,820 per month on the table for someone to grab if just 1/4 of these searches are serious…think about it! (It’s almost $300,000 if all of the searches want to buy plumbing services, which is really closer to the truth, but I’m being conservative)
By the way, fun fact: since we know that the top search result on Google often gets more than 30 percent of the traffic, minimum, if we vaulted an as-yet unranked plumber into the top 10 and then to number 1, for the search term that has 320 searches per month, that would give them conservatively 96 click-throughs per month. And if we assume that just 1/4 of those resulted in a call for business, using the figure from before, that would mean $31,776 per month in revenue for just that one plumbing company. Incredible.
Kingwood Dentists’ SEO needs a root canal!
Dental services are expensive, but not as expensive as being a dentist and not doing SEO. There’s not nearly as much competition in Kingwood as I expected, and as with the plumbers, a lot of money is being left on the table.
Here’s the metrics for dentist searches in Kingwood…
Total number of keywords (Google search terms) related to finding a dentist in Kingwood: 150
Total monthly volume of searches for a plumber in Kingwood: estimated at 2,500 or 30,000 per year
Average difficulty of ranking for those keywords (score out of 100, with 100 being most difficult): 21%
Average all-cause cost to hire a plumber, according to The Dental Center: $290
Using that figure, average estimated value of these Google searches if we assume that only one-fourth of the searches are high-intent, ready to buy (which is extremely conservative – root canals are very expensive!): $181,250 per month
Here’s the dentist version of the chart I introduced you to before with plumbers.
The number on the left is search volume per month, and the number on the right is difficulty. Two big takeaways here.
First, the volume of searches is far greater. This means that even if there wasn’t much SEO being done, all it really takes is having a website that enough people are going to, and voila! You rank on Google. Kingwood has some well-established dentists, and that appears to be some of what’s going on. It may be that one or two of them are using SEO, but no one is dominating the market. Low 30s is still fairly uncompetitive.
What I really want to draw your attention to is the lowest-difficulty search term rows, where you can see that a search term with a volume of 140 only has a difficulty rating of 2%, one with 110 has 6%, and one with 50 has 8%! That’s an astonishing 330 searches for terms that are basically uncompetitive to the extreme – there’s a good chance we could rank for those terms for a client within a month or two.
And what’s astonishing, as well, is that some of the easiest search terms to rank for here are the most valuable… just incredible!
To any Kingwood dentists or smart dentists’ office admins reading this: schedule a meeting with us! We would be happy to help you start getting up in those searches. There’s a lot of opportunity here for someone willing to go after it.
The biggest surprise SEO Kingwood fail? Realtors!
I was surprised by this one! Realtors happen to be one group that truly understands the value of marketing, although what I would call “effective marketing tactics” are often limited to the biggest, most professional firms. There are definitely some savvy realtors out there who understand how to market beyond open houses with bags of Cheetos, but there are many more who could benefit from a little bit of help (hey! hey! over here!).
You’ll notice that the keyword difficulty, 30%, is highest for realtors of all the terms we’ve looked at. The reason isn’t local real estate competition, it’s the big giant real estate search websites. These guys spend, I’m not joking, billions of dollars per year on SEO and dominating Google results. If the big real estate listings companies get homebuyers clicking on them, they make money, so it’s their whole business model. Local realtors, of course, would love everyone to use their local MLS… not gonna happen, it’s never going to beat Zillow and Trulia and so on (even though the HAR.com MLS search is fantastic).
Nevertheless, local realtors can and do rank in Google searches for realtors, especially in local area searches. Google even seems to prioritize these geographically local realtors over the big aggregators in local searches.
I won’t get into the specifics of search terms related to Kingwood realtors (although I did an article about that same thing in College Station you can check out if you wish), but here’s one interesting thing: the only local real estate firm to rank in the top 10 for the biggest search term on Google was Remax. That’s it! And they’re way down there, at the bottom of the top 10, where they won’t get much business from it.
Here’s the metrics for realtor searches in Kingwood…
Total number of keywords (Google search terms) related to finding a dentist in Kingwood: 42
Total monthly volume of searches for a plumber in Kingwood: estimated at 290 or 3,480 per year
Average difficulty of ranking for those keywords (score out of 100, with 100 being most difficult): 30%
Average home sale in Kingwood according to Redfin: $347,000 – times 3% commission, average commission is $10,410
Using that figure, average estimated commission value of these Google searches if we assume that only one-fourth of the searches end up in someone buying a home (though looking for a realtor, as opposed to “real estate,” is very high intentionality): $754,725 per month in home sales commission
Notice that the search volume is low, but that’s because not many people are actively looking for a realtor at any given time. Many people browse homes, but that’s not the same thing.
These searches reflect that people look for realtors, once thought of as an exclusively interpersonal marketing effort, via Google searches – the same way they look for hospitals, home services, childcare, school ratings, and everything else these days.
Many realtors stick to “tried and true” methods of open houses with punch bowls and Doritos or whatever, but I can assure you, you’ll end up finding a lot more new clients if you are focus on winning the Google battle, and work to put out some valuable content and materials besides.
Should you hire a Kingwood SEO company?
There are millions of dollars in Google search value per month for many industries just in Kingwood, to say nothing of other areas of the Greater Houston area. The numbers pulled for this article are reflected across every industry I’ve tested in Kingwood, meaning that essentially any business that wants to rank in Google’s top 10 in Kingwood, can with a little bit of effort and patience.
So yes, as the best SEO company in Kingwood, we might be a little biased saying that you should call us – but it’s a conversation well worth having. Even if you don’t end up hiring us, we’re fairly confident you’ll learn something about how people are finding your business.
Schedule a free consultation using the form below, or reach out to us with the contact form, and we’ll get back to you ASAP to discuss your business’ needs in Kingwood (and any other area you want to win in!).
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Use this contact form to send us a message. We’ll get back to you ASAP. Or, you may schedule 30 minutes of our time with the scheduling app to the right.
You can schedule 15 or 30 minutes at no cost to talk with us about your needs below. We’re available 6 days per week at a time convenient for you. This is, by far, the most convenient (and helpful) way for us to see if we can help you out. By prior agreement or for existing clients, you may also book 1-hour meetings and phone consultations.
Contact
Use this contact form to send us a message. We’ll get back to you ASAP. Or, you may schedule 30 minutes of our time with the scheduling app to the right.
Schedule
You can schedule 15 or 30 minutes at no cost to talk with us about your needs below. We’re available 6 days per week at a time convenient for you. This is, by far, the most convenient (and helpful) way for us to see if we can help you out. By prior agreement or for existing clients, you may also book 1-hour meetings and phone consultations.