Oluwadunmola Adefioye | Updated: February 19, 2024 | Home services marketing
If you own a contractor business, your reputation is built on the quality of your work. You build amazing structures, remodel kitchens, and fix roofs that can handle any rough weather. But if customers can’t find you online, all that skill doesn’t mean much. That’s where SEO for Contractors comes in.
SEO for Contractors is the key to getting your website seen by people actually looking for your services. No more hoping someone stumbles across your site. With proper strategies in placed, SEO puts you right in front page of local search of potential customers when they’re ready to avail your services.
Ready to get started? Keep reading!
SEO for contractors is a proven strategy to make your contacting website rank higher on Google and other search engines. By utilizing all of SEO’s best practices, you help search engines understand what your site is all about. Search engines can recommend you when people search for specific services and put you on the front page if your website is properly optimized.
Additionally, Google’s EEAT guidelines emphasize Expertise, Experience, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. This means that your website also needs to show your readers that you can be trusted. You can provide clear information on what you do by showcasing your expertise in your industry. This can be done by highlighting real-world projects from your past clients. You may also add licensing information, customer testimonials, and helpful content that proves you know what you’re doing to help you build your authority.
Local SEO can help you target more potential customers searching for your services in your area. A research by BrightLocal in 2023 shows 87% of consumers are using Google to search and evaluate a local business in given location. This is a great opportunity to showcase your website and highlight all the services you offer. But how do you exactly do this?
A Google Business Profile is a free service by Google that helps you showcase your business on Google and be visible on the map. It allows you to display important information about your business, such as your name, address, phone number, and the business category you are in. As a local service provider, you must consider listing your business website here to ensure you are also seen on Google Maps.
Local keywords are search keyphrase that searchers would most likely use when looking for a specific service within their locality. It contains the main keyword, which is the main category or service of the business, and some search modifiers like the name of the city or town. A great example for these are keywords like “plumbers in New York” or “Phoenix landscaping company“. Optimizing your page using these local keywords in your HTML tags and the body of your content increases your chance of ranking higher on local search.
Local SEO success involves understanding how customers search online. People don’t just look for “plumbers” or “roofing contractors” – they want services near them. Geo-targeted content is your way to capture these valuable searches.
You can take full advantage of this by including the city, town, or neighborhood names naturally into your website pages and blog posts. You can also include references to local landmarks and events. Instead of naming your page “home renovations,” why not doing it like “home renovations in [Your City].“
One of the best ways to promote your contracting business online is through get listed on local citations and directories. These websites also support review system, even more reason to utilize these websites considering that 9 out of 10 purchases are made after users check the online reviews.
These platforms can help you reach ideal customers looking for contractor services in your area.
Your track record in these business directories helps boost your online reputation and visibility. Some of the most popular and effective sites for your construction company are HomeAdvisor, Angie’s List, Houzz, Thumbtack, BBB, and Yelp.
Collaborating with local influencers in the construction or home improvement niche can lead to quality backlinks from their platforms. These links can significantly increase your contractor website’s authority. Similarly, partnering with local businesses, such as real estate agencies or hardware stores, can result in mutually beneficial link exchanges. Though link exchange may hurt the website’s ranking, if done correctly, it can help your local SEO efforts by driving relevant traffic to your website.
Make sure you consistently publish high-quality articles and even videos related to your service to establish yourself as an expert in your industry. When you create a content, ensure that you target specific areas and services that you provide services to. Avoid generic topics such as ” home renovations” instead, think about things such as ” kitchen remodeling trends in [Your City]“.
Additionally, digital PR boosts can boost your Local SEO campaign in many ways. You can send your information to local news sites or local blogs as well as local magazines. When these reputable websites link back to you, it indicates search engines that you’re a reliable and trustworthy source of information in your area. Plus, you’ll get better leads since potential clients will start seeing you as the go-to expert.
Utilizing SEO for contractors can have several positive effects on your website if you want to stay ahead of your competitors. Which is why you should consider investing in SEO as part of your digital marketing strategy.
Here are some key benefits for doing SEO for your contractor website:
Optimizing your general contractor website can be achieved if you follow SEO’s best practices. Let’s work you through our list of our systematic SEO approach that helped on our previous local SEO campaigns from previous clients.
Our SEO process always begins with a thorough website audit. This crucial first step allows us to get a clear picture of your website’s overall health and pinpoint any potential issues. During the audit, we’ll meticulously examine factors like your site’s speed, mobile-friendliness, and internal linking structure to ensure everything is up to par for search engines.
We’ll also analyze aspects like how easy it is for users to navigate and whether your website has clear calls to action. We’ll also analyze if your branding and messaging effectively target leads within your service area.
After the website audit, we generate a detailed report that should highlight opportunities and forming the foundation of a custom SEO strategy designed to improve your local search rankings.
Doing a local keyword research involve understanding how potential customers in your area actually search for the services. Instead of using general terms like “plumber,” think about what someone would search if they had a burst pipe right now – something like “emergency plumber near me” or “water leak repair [Your City]“.
Doing extensive keyword research can help you target these exact phrases, questions, and even pain points people are typing into search engines. Is it a leaky faucet they want fixed quickly, or concerns about major water damage?
By using this technique, you are not only relying on third-party metrics from different SEO tools. You will also think about how you can answer your customer pain points and queries and use this as an opportunity to offer your services as a solution.
Other factors that we consider when doing keyword research are:
Keyword mapping is the strategic aligning of relevant keywords to specific pages or sections of your website. This will give your website a better structure and to avoid multiple pages competing for the same keyword which also refers to as keyword cannibalization.
For instance, we might find that “bathroom remodel [Your City]” is a high-value search term. Keyword mapping would help us decide whether to optimize an existing page on bathroom renovations or if you need a dedicated page to fully target that specific customer need in your location.
Keep your friends close but keep your enemies closer. That is why we understand that knowing about your local competition is important for a successful SEO campaign. We don’t do competitor analysis to simply copy what others are doing. Our goal and objective are to identify their strengths, weaknesses, and any opportunities they might be missing.
This analysis allows us to come up with a better customized SEO strategy to differentiate your business against your competitors. This can be done by targeting valuable keywords they’ve overlooked and provide a better solution for potential clients. The ultimate goal is to outrank the competition in those all-important local search results.
On-page SEO is where we take the keywords discovered in our research and place them to specific pages. These keywords must also be placed naturally to avoid keyword stuffing that could hurt your website. These keywords can be strategically placed on page titles, headings, and throughout your website’s content.
We also pay close attention to local optimization. Your city or neighborhood should be prominent within your key pages (a.k.a. your location pages). On-page SEO also involves making sure your images are properly optimized. This helps search engines understand them which can further boost your rankings for local image searches.
Off-page SEO focuses on building your website’s reputation and authority outside of your own website through link acquisitions. Our main focus is earning high-quality backlinks which may include local links or niche-relevant links.
We’ll pursue links from local directories and partner-up with relevant businesses in your area. We’ll also utilize other strategies like content marketing and digital PR to showcase your expertise in local publications. These backlinks act as “votes of confidence” from other websites, that signals search engines that your business is legitimate and trustworthy within your specific location or niche.
On this step, we always make sure that we build links using white-hat methods. This means that we prioritize quality over quantity when acquiring links from different websites.
Optimizing technical SEO for contractor websites involves fixing various aspects of your website to improve its crawlability, indexability, and overall performance. Here are some critical technical SEO practices for contractor websites:
We believe in SEO transparency. That’s why we won’t bombard you with complex reports filled with meaningless charts and jargon. Instead, we generate clear, focused reports that highlight the metrics that truly matter for your contracting business. We’ll track your rankings for your target keywords, changes in website traffic, and any increases in leads or conversions directly attributed to our SEO efforts.
Each report will include easy-to-understand explanations alongside the numbers, so you don’t need technical SEO knowledge to see the progress we’re making. Our reporting will help you to stay informed about your investment to keep you on the loop and give you an idea what was happening during the campaign.
A high-quality and well-maintained blog is a powerful tool to establish your authority in your industry which attract ideal clients in return. Each blog post allows you to naturally utilize various local keywords and related search terms which can expand your reach outside your main website’s money pages.
By regularly adding valuable blog posts, it shows search engines that your website is active and a trusted source of information for your services and area. Helpful blog posts can also be shared on social media or linked to on other sites. This is one way of building high quality and natural backlinks.
Lastly, posting blogs is an opportunity to demonstrate your expertise, answer customers’ common questions, and showcase your knowledge in a way that builds trust and authority.
Adhering to Google’s helpful content guidelines to ensure relevance, reliability, and user engagement helps improve the quality of your content. Your content should address the specific needs and queries of the target audience that provide valuable information that educates and informs. This means that your top priority when publishing your content is to provide value to the readers rather than just posting for rankings.
In addition, your content should be optimized for user experience, focusing on readability, and accessibility. This includes using descriptive headings, bullet points, and images to break up text and ensure easy navigation and better readability.
Before you write any content or go straight into optimization, you need to know the terms potential customers are using to find services like yours. Targeting the wrong keywords, or ignoring them altogether, can result in wasted time and effort. Remember, keyword research allows you to understand local search demand and helps strategized your content based on these keywords.
Creating a clear internal linking structure is an important part of SEO. Internal links are links that point from one page of your website to another page of your website. They help users navigate your site and find relevant content.
They also help search engines crawl and index your site and understand the structure and hierarchy of your pages. By creating internal links that use descriptive anchor texts, you can signal to search engines what each page is about and how it relates to other pages.
A well-structured internal linking system boosts authority and relevance for your target keywords by passing link juice from one page to other pages that need more exposure and visibility.
Acquire high-quality backlinks from authoritative websites in the construction or home improvement niche. This can be achieved through guest blogging and partnerships.
Page loading speed is a crucial ranking factor and user experience as per Google’s guidelines. Use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights to identify and fix performance issues on your website. Ensure your website is mobile-friendly, as most local searches now happen on smartphones. Test your website’s usability across different devices and browsers to make sure they work as intended.
Technical SEO is often overlooked by inexperienced SEO Specialists. This includes aspects like sitemap submission, robot.txt configuration, structured data markup, page speed, and mobile friendliness.
You can optimize your web pages for conversions by strategically incorporating effective calls-to-action (CTAs) and testimonials. When optimizing for conversions, make sure to:
One way in creating an effective content is by understanding the specific problems and frustrations your customers is having and offer solutions to these problems in return. You can implement this by paying attention to both direct complaints and implied needs.
Check other channels like industry forums, social media groups, and review sites to identify common problems homeowners face when they need services like yours. Also, find out what your competitors do well and where they fall short. This can highlight areas where you can address customer pain points and stand out.
By combining all these information, you can provide a customized solutions to your customers’ problems and needs and could guarantee a successful conversion.
This is the specific type of service or product that you offer as a contractor that gives you a competitive advantage. You need to choose relevant and exact keywords for your business, as they will help you attract qualified leads and customers looking for what you offer.
You must also differentiate yourself from your competitors by highlighting your unique selling proposition (USP) and value proposition.
By optimizing your website for relevant keywords, creating valuable content, and earning backlinks from other reputable sites, you can boost your ranking on search engines and increase your online reputation. This way, you can showcase your expertise, portfolio, and value proposition to your target audience.
Creating web pages for each contractor service demonstrates your expertise and professionalism to potential clients who visit your website. It is effective because potential customers don’t have to sort through needless information to get what they want.
Setting up separate web pages for each contractor service you offer can boost your SEO ranking potential. This makes your brand more visible to potential clients through the SERPs, and you can generate more SEO leads.
On the other hand, creating content centered around your different general contractor services can also work. This is one of the potent techniques that works in SEO for home service.
Local SEO for contractors primarily helps you rank higher on search engines for local searches. This can bring more visibility, traffic, and leads to their websites and increase their credibility and reputation in their area.
The best practices for creating engaging content for your audience include knowing your audience well, using clear and concise language they understand, and using a variety of formats and media to deliver your content.
SEO for contractors is a vital part of any digital marketing efforts. Its long-term benefits make it the perfect marketing setup for contractors. However, continuous execution of the SEO best practices is the key to maintaining and improving your website’s search appearance chances.
Doing the tips listed above can be overwhelming, so we recommend hiring an SEO company to help ease the burden. Knowing the proper criteria for your SEO website enables you to manage your SEO marketing expectations and results.
Do you want to work with us?
We are an experienced digital marketing agency with tailor-made solutions for our clients. We help home service businesses and general contractors handle lead generation, website optimization, and digital marketing needs. Talk to our experts today to start holistic marketing for your general contractor business.
I enjoy writing engaging and practical articles that help local businesses grow. That’s why I take my time to understand the industry - customers and businesses - before writing a word.
Aside from content marketing, I enjoy watching football and love my beloved Arsenal FC.
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