Search engine optimization (SEO) and paid search advertising are two essential components of Garage Door Repair Internet Marketing. Both require the use of relevant keywords in order to reach your desired target audience.
A successful Garage Door SEO campaign requires creating original content around keywords that are relevant to the services that your garage door company provides.
Google Ads for Garage Door Pros involves setting up PPC advertising campaigns to get your advertising message in front of a potential customer at the exact moment that they're searching on Google or Bing for your garage door repair services. You'll use keywords here within the text of your Google Ad or Microsoft Ad. You'll also use the keywords in your ad campaigns to trigger ads when someone searches for your services.
Both SEO and search engine advertising are online marketing strategies that drive traffic to your garage door company website where you'll have the chance to convert potential clients into paying customers.
Note, the use of keywords for your garage door repair company isn't limited to search ads or SEO. You can even use these relevant keywords for local SEO purposes by enhancing your Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business).
Find Your Own Keywords
In this post, I first discuss the methods and tools that you can use to find additional keywords for your garage door marketing efforts.
Use Our Keyword List
At the end of the post, I provide you with 219 keywords related to garage services that you can review, modify, and use in your own paid search campaigns. You can also use the keywords as a starting point for search engine optimization to get more customers to your website.
Note that in each example, I use 1 seed keyword - like "garage door" or "garage door repair". While this is a good starting point, you'll want to get deeper into your garage door services when using these keyword tools.
For example, you'll want seed each keyword tool with multiple different keywords to see if you get different results. Example keywords to try would be "broken torsion spring", "roller replacements", "Off track garage door", "door opener replacement".
This is a paid tool that starts at around $29/mo, but they do have a 10-day free trial.
With Mangools, you'll enter your keyword, location, and language, and it will return a bunch of valuable information that is helpful for both SEO and PPC purposes. While the actual numbers won't be 100% accurate (only Google has access to 100% accurate search data), the data will help you focus on the right keywords.
In this case, we chose "garage door" as our keyword and set our location to "Cleveland, Ohio" (1). By default, it shows Related Keywords (2).
Note that you can also toggle to "Autocomplete" or "Questions". Creating website content around Google Autocomplete or Questions is a fantastic SEO Strategy. These are generally lower volume keywords that have little in the way of competition - making it possible to get organic traffic (free)to your company website.
Keyword Table (Left Panel)
Beneath our search are the keywords that are returned in the keyword table
Keywords (3) - these are the keywords that you may wish to analyze for use in paid search or SEO campaigns.
Search (4) - this is the average monthly search volume for the last 12 months based on the search parameters (searches for "garage door" in Cleveland). We can see that around 80 people each month search for "garage door replacement" in Cleveland.
CPC (5) - this is the estimated cost per click for the keyword in Google Ads paid search. Again, using the garage door replacement example, you can see that the estimated cost per click would be around $9.68. This is just an estimate, and the cost per click in your advertising campaign will vary widely based on many factors including ad position and your location. However, looking at the data, it is fair to say that bidding on "garage door companies near me" at an estimated CPC of $10.65 will likely be much more expensive than bidding on "overhead garage door" at $0.61.
KD (6) - this is keyword difficulty and it is for SEO purposes. For garage door, the keyword difficulty is 33 - which they say is "Possible" - meaning it will be a challenge to rank, but it is within the realm of possibility. The higher the number, the more difficult it will be to rank near the top of the search results. To see the keyword difficulty for other keywords, you'll have to click on the magnifying glass.
Keyword SEO Data (Right Panel)
The right-hand panel contains SEO data for the keyword that is highlighted in the left panel. Here we can see the keyword difficulty highlighted again (7), along with the Search Engine Results Page (8) overview for the keyword-based on our original keyword search parameters. Note that the top search result is held by homedepot.com. This gives you great information about the companies that you'll be going up against should you choose to try to rank for the selected keyword.
Export and Create Lists
You can create lists and export data from this interface so you can find good keywords to use for your campaigns offline.
ahrefs is another paid keyword tool - although they do have relatively inexpensive ($7) 7 day trials.
Once you've signed up, you can navigate to the keywords explorer and enter a seed keyword. We've entered our keyword - "garage door repair" (9) - and kept the default settings of Google as our search engine and The United States as the search location as you can see below.
From the results page, we click on "Related Terms" (10) to get a better look at available keywords.
From the results below, we can see that we have 437 potential keywords to choose from. You can save these keywords to a list or export for offline analysis in your favorite spreadsheet. Here's a brief overview of some of the columns that may be useful for your garage services campaigns.
Keywords (11) - A list of keywords you can use for search engine optimization or Google Ads
KD (12) - This is the keyword difficulty which is ahrefs' proprietary method in which to determine how difficult it would be to rank for that given keyword. Higher numbers are much harder to rank than lower numbers. The KD is on a logarithmic scale, which means that ranking for a KD of 20 is much more than twice as hard to rank for a KD 10 keyword.
Volume (13) - This is the average monthly search volume for the given keyword based on the search parameters in our original search.
CPC (14) - This is the estimated cost per click you can expect if you're running ppc ads for this keyword. Ahrefs bases this off Google data, but as mentioned previously, cost per click varies widely for each search and each ad position
SERP (15) - Here you can see the search engine results for the keyword
Export (16) - You can export ahrefs data to do an offline analysis
This tool used to be called something a little bit different and it was completely free - now it appears that they're moving it towards more of a paid model - but you can still get results for free (at least at the time of this article being published).
What the tool does is provide you a list of Google autocomplete suggestions based on the keyword that you provide. Here, from the "Keyword Ideas Tools" tab (17), using the default search settings (18), I provided the keyword "garage door" (19) and then pressed the "sheet keywords" button (20). You can also apply positive and negative filters to refine your results.
As of this moment, you can copy the results to a spreadsheet. Subscriptions start at $9/mo.
You can find keywords during your account setup in Google Ads. This process is detailed towards the bottom of our Google Ads for Garage Door Companies article (the keywords section).
If you've already signed up for Google Ads, you can access Google's Keyword Planner by going to "Tools and Settings" (21), and then selecting "Keyword Planner" (22)
Once you're in the keyword planner, you'll likely want to start with keywords (23), enter as many keywords as you would like (24) - here we entered "garage door repair". Then when ready, click on the "Get Results" button (25).
As you can see below, Google returns 962 Keywords in a Keyword plan (26). In the table, you can see keyword ideas (27), Average monthly searches for each keyword idea (28), and top of page bidding information (29) & (30).
You can refine your results by broadening your search - or clicking the refine keywords link in the upper right (31).
Google provides these results and allows you to add them directly to your search ad campaigns. I prefer to take things offline by clicking the download button (32) rather than just dumping them directly into my ad campaigns.
Based on experience and using some of the tools above, here is a starting set of 219 keywords to consider using in your garage door digital marketing. You can plug keywords that are relevant to your business into the appropriate PPC campaign or SEO campaign.
This isn't a comprehensive list, and you should do your own keyword research to find keywords that make sense for your business.
Note that for paid search campaigns, you will want to add qualifiers to some of the keywords below.
Location qualifiers
For example, a lot of people search for "near me", "my area" or their location (e.g. "garage door repair denver"). Therefore, for some keywords, you may wish to append city names that you service - or the "near me" qualifier.
Price qualifiers
A lot of searches include "cost" or "price" as part of their search. Those keywords weren't included in these lists. If you have detailed price or cost information for specific services - and can easily justify those prices, then you may wish to add those qualifiers to your keywords. In some areas, I include price and cost as negative keywords because in some cases these consumers are focused solely on price as opposed to any other aspects of garage door service. They can be tire-kickers.
Brands
If your garage door business services certain brands repeatedly, you may wish to include model numbers as part of your keyword as consumers may be searching for those brands.
An example keyword might be "LiftMaster 8355W garage door opener repair".
Negative Keywords
Most of the keywords below are somewhat popular. If you don't offer that service or brand, then make it a negative keyword. Note - for more details about negative keywords check out our separate post that covers negative keywords for garage door services.
For example, if you don't service commercial garage doors - or brand by a particular manufacturer, you should make those specific keywords negative keywords in your paid search advertising campaigns. For example, "commercial" and "Wayne Dalton" might be negative keywords depending on the services you provide.
