Pest Control Marketing Ideas That Still Work When the Phones Go Quiet

The marketing ideas that work in the slow months are the ones that get your website and Google profile ready before the phones start ringing again: collecting reviews from this season's customers, refreshing your service pages, writing the spring pages now, building a commercial page and cleaning up your listings. Very little of it brings calls in January. It brings calls in the first warm weeks of the year, while the companies that waited are still writing.

The reason is timing. A new page needs time to be found by Google, settle into the results and pick up a link or two, and that usually takes weeks to months. Work done during the slow stretch is what's ready when the season turns. Work done once the phone is ringing tends to land after the peak.

Below are seven ideas, ordered roughly by how soon each one pays back. Each has an honest estimate of the effort and when you'd expect to see something from it.

1. Ask this season's customers for reviews

Your winter customers are still customers. The quarterly stops you're running now, the rodent jobs from the fall, the commercial accounts you service every month: most of them have never been asked for a review. Pull a list of everyone you've serviced since late summer and send each one your Google review link with a short note from the tech who did the work.

Ask all of them, including the ones you're unsure about. Asking only happy customers (review gating) and offering anything in exchange for a review both break Google's review policies.

• Effort: about an hour to build the list and the message, then a few minutes a day.
• Pays off: within weeks. New reviews show on your profile right away, and their dates are the first thing a spring searcher sees.

2. Read what people searched to find you last year

Your Google Business Profile shows the search terms people used before they found your listing. Open the performance section and write down the terms from last spring and summer. You'll often find phrases you never thought to put on your website: a pest you treat but don't mention, a town name, a word like "exterminator" that your callers use and your site doesn't.

That list becomes the to-do list for ideas 3 and 4.

• Effort: an hour.
• Pays off: right away as a plan, and in spring once the pages it leads to are live.

3. Write your spring pages now

Spring searches start the day the first ants show up on a kitchen counter or the first winged insects appear on a windowsill, and timing varies by region and weather. The page that answers "flying ants or termites" or "ants in kitchen" needs to exist well before that day. Pick the three or four spring pages your market needs most (often a termite inspection page, a page on telling swarmers from flying ants, an ant control page, and a page for your general quarterly plan) and write one a week.

Each page should sound like your company: the towns you cover, what your tech does on the first visit, what a plan includes, photos from your own routes. The season planner can help you lay out which pages to publish when, so each one has time to settle before its season.

• Effort: a day per page, including photos.
• Pays off: in your first busy spring weeks, if the pages go up at least a month or two ahead.

4. Refresh the service pages you already have

Plenty of pest control sites have service pages that were written once, years ago, and never touched. Winter is the time to open each one and fix what's stale. Replace stock photos with real ones from this year. Add the questions your office answered most on the phone last season, with short, direct answers. Update the service area if your routes have grown. Make sure each page says what the visit includes, how often you come back and what happens if pests return between visits.

Start with the pages that bring the most visits or the most money. For many residential companies that means general pest, termites and rodents.

• Effort: an afternoon per page.
• Pays off: within a couple of months, as Google recrawls the updated pages, and every season after that.

5. Clean up your listings across the web

Your company's name, address and phone number appear on dozens of sites: Yelp, the Better Business Bureau, Angi, Nextdoor, industry association directories, and the data providers that feed smaller directories. When those listings disagree (an old address from before you moved, a phone number you dropped, a name from before a rebrand), it confuses homeowners and gives search engines mixed signals about which details are right.

Search your company name and your old phone number, and fix every listing you find. Some sites need a verification call or a code by mail, so start now and expect it to take a few weeks.

• Effort: a day or two of work spread over several weeks.
• Pays off: hard to see directly. It removes a reason for doubt, both for Google and for the homeowner who finds your old number on a directory in April.

6. Make your website load fast on a phone

Homeowners standing in a kitchen with a problem are searching on their phones. If your site takes a long time to load or the call button is hard to find, they go back and tap the next result. Run your homepage and your top service pages through Google's PageSpeed Insights, which is free, and look at the mobile results.

The usual culprits on pest control sites are large uncompressed photos, homepage sliders, and chat or review widgets that load a lot of extra code. Removing a slider and resizing photos often helps more than anything technical.

• Effort: a few hours if you're comfortable editing your site, or a short job for whoever built it.
• Pays off: every month, starting as soon as it's fixed.

7. Build one real commercial page

Commercial buyers don't search on the residential calendar. A restaurant owner facing a health inspection, a property manager with a tenant complaint or a warehouse manager preparing for an audit searches when the problem shows up, and that can be any month. If commercial work is part of your business, one solid page for it is worth more than a line on the homepage.

Write for the buyer you want most: restaurants, apartment complexes, offices or warehouses. Explain how service visits work, what documentation you provide after each visit, how you schedule around business hours, and how contracts and renewals work. Commercial buyers want to see that you've done this before, so use photos of your own commercial work (with the client's permission) and say plainly which kinds of properties you service.

• Effort: two or three days, including photos and the contract summary.
• Pays off: slower than residential, since commercial decisions take longer, but a commercial account that's well served can stay for years.

How the seven fit together

Each of these makes more sense as part of a plan than as a one-off project. Reviews feed the profile, the profile sends people to the pages, the pages answer the questions that get them to call, and the clean listings keep anyone from doubting they've found the right company.

If you'd like help deciding which of these to do first for your market, our page on pest control marketing built around the season explains how we plan the slow months so the spring pages are ready before the phones are.