Do General Contractors Need SEO?

In your experience as a general contractor, you’d never build someone an outdoor deck out of the best pressure-treated hardwood and then forget to Anchorseal the ends, right? Deck building, just like roofing, excavating a foundation or installing dry wall, is a precise process. You’d do the job right from beginning to end.

You know that every detail matters. If you let the little things slide because of time or money, they’ll only come back to haunt you later. As one of the most respected professionals in the local construction business, you wouldn’t pack up and go until the job was properly finished, from the foundation to the wallpaper.

Your general contracting website runs on the same principles. Using professional SEO Strategies in 2022 may seem like a small detail, but it remains a critical part of any cutting-edge strategy for digital commerce. Even if you may have read some overenthusiastic naysayer declaring that their latest tactic is far superior for this specific moment in history, search engine optimization is still one of the most important pillars of a well-rounded digital marketing strategy.

Without an in-depth understanding of how search algorithms work, it can be a bit hard to grasp why we need search engine optimization. Here’s a quick refresher of a few of the most powerful benefits of search engine optimization:

Helps turn organic searches into leads your business can follow up on
Moves your website closer to the top of the list when people search for your services
Keeps working for you in the background long after you’ve stopped thinking about it
People who find your website thanks to your optimized search terms are much more likely to become customers
A higher-ranked site gives you more credibility and familiarizes more people with your brand

In summary, a good search engine optimization campaign can rocket your contracting website to the hallowed sanctuary of Google’s first page of results when potential customers search for “nearby contractors” and other relevant terms.

If you decide not to use search engine optimization strategies to boost your contracting site, your competition’s web marketing will almost definitely be more effective than yours. Over time, their online presence will rank higher than yours, which will channel more of your potential customers in their direction.

Do you need more convincing that search engine optimization is exactly the boost you need as a professional contractor? Let’s dive a little deeper into why, even in 2022, this inbound marketing strategy is still so effective for general contractors with all kinds of small construction businesses.

Google’s First Page May as Well Be the Only Page

Let’s do an experiment right now. Go to Google and search for “contractors” plus the name of the city you’re located in. If you’re a contractor based out of Chicago, type “contractors in Chicago” into your search toolbar, and see what comes up.

The first page is all we need to look at for now. Does your company’s site pop up somewhere on the first page of search results? If not, we have bad news and good news for you. The bad news is that you’re almost certainly letting throngs of potential clients slip through the cracks to get snapped up by your competition. The good news is that you can change that right now with professional Search Engine Optimization.

Let’s talk numbers. Rather than overwhelm you with jargon, we want to highlight three simple statistics that showcase the drastic difference between appearing on the first page of a Google search related to your business versus any other page:

For any organic search result on Google, the average click-through rate (CTR) of the very first result is above 31%.
The percentage of people who check the results on the second page and beyond is less than 1% of Google users
Just getting Google to rank your site one spot higher in the results page for your most relevant search terms can increase your CTR by an average of 30%.

The numbers clearly show that getting your contracting website as high as possible on the first page of the most relevant local search terms is the most important facet of digital marketing. If you need more numbers, we’ve got them, but we think the above three statistics make our case loud and clear.

By far, most of your potential online leads and prospects are using Google to search for the right contractor, and it’s rare for any of them to even think about looking any further than the holy temple that is Google’s first page of results.

Get More Qualified Leads

Not only is search engine optimization a marvelous way to give your brand more credibility and public awareness, it’s also one of the best ways to generate qualified leads that you can turn into long-term customers. The crazy amount of viable prospects that a higher search engine ranking can channel your way is one of the seriously underestimated facets of using search engine optimization as an inbound marketing strategy.

Most of the people using Google to search for contracting services aren’t just curious about the construction industry or just looking to prepare for an eventual need sometime in the future. If someone is searching for a general contractor, it’s usually because they need help pronto!

As we talked about earlier, the higher Google ranks your site, the more traffic you’ll get. The better you optimize your website for Google and other search engines, the more potential customers desperate for an expert general contractor will find you.

The vast majority of consumers in 2022 use their personal online research to help them make decisions about what to buy and who to hire. If your site isn’t highly visible among the first few results for the terms they’re searching for, we can almost guarantee you that they’ll become customers of another general contractor with a higher ranked website.

Give Customers A Better Experience Online

Google takes into consideration a lot of different factors when assessing and ranking the different websites they catalog. One aspect that they’ve been paying more attention to recently is the quality of the user experience.

The more Google focuses on user experience, the more search engine optimization professionals have to zero in on giving visitors to your site a more satisfying visit. The better your site is at all the little things that add up to a great user experience, the higher it will rank in search engines’ organic results pages. This includes things like:

Higher-quality content
More user-friendly navigation
Quicker loading speeds
Better overall functionality

Search engine optimization not only channels visitors and potential customers to your contracting website, it also focuses on improving their experience there and encourages them to keep coming back.

When your inbound marketing strategy includes making your website fast, functional and easy to navigate, you start a beautiful cycle that acts like a self-perpetuating flywheel. A better user experience gets your site ranked higher. That brings in more potential clients who find what they need quicker and easier. Visitors who have positive experiences on your site are much more likely to turn into satisfied customers. Satisfied customers keep coming back, which will get your site ranked even higher.

Impressive ROI

Another great thing about search engine optimization is all the data that it gives you access to. When you incorporate SEO into the digital marketing of your contracting services, you’ll get back mountains of hard data that you can use to analyze the success of your campaign. You’ll have real numbers you can use to check your exact return on investment (ROI) so you can make sure that what you’re doing is worth the money and effort you’re putting in.

As we all slowly emerge from the pandemic and its economic implications, we’re seeing a pattern of caution in the overall spending of general contractors as well as most other industries. If you’re at all familiar with search engine optimization, you understand that it’s a long-term tactic with a payoff that won’t necessarily come overnight. Even though it may take a while to reap the full benefits, the analytic capabilities it gives you is one benefit you can reap in the short term.

You’ll be able to track which keywords brought you more traffic and kept more people on your site for longer. You’ll be able to follow the conversion rate numbers in real time and see exactly which strategies helped you turn more casual visitors into loyal customers and which aspects might not be working as well as you hoped.

Become A More Trusted Expert

Although you may already be an expert at organizing your team and overseeing all kinds of construction projects, in the eyes of the potential customers searching online for urgent contracting services, you’re only as trustworthy as your website’s search engine ranking. Search engine optimization can be the tipping point between being seen as a credible, reputable expert and not being seen at all.

Even if things may not work like that in the real world, in the online world, higher-ranked sites are seen as more legitimate and more trustworthy than all the sites ranked below them. Your site’s ranking may not make a difference to the people who know you, but to new customers looking for a general contractor with a good reputation, it can make all the difference.

The right search engine optimization strategy will take advantage of Google’s search algorithms to show consumers that you’re a trusted expert who knows what they’re talking about. A good digital marketing strategy will help you gain the search engines’ trust, and the search engines will communicate that trust to all their users. Over time, more online credibility will turn into more traffic to your site, which will turn into more qualified leads and more sales for your business.

Custom SEO Solutions for Your General Contracting Company

Search engine optimization is not just another strategy for online marketing that can bring more eyeballs to your site. In 2022, it’s become an essential part of helping expand the lead between your business and the competition. The qualified leads and actual conversions that it can help you generate tend to grow almost exponentially over time.

Every second that goes by without your website being optimized professionally for search engine traffic translates into an eternity of not being seen by the people who are searching for your contracting services right now.

When you decide to invest in a custom search engine optimization plan built specifically for your contracting company, we here at Triton Commerce have everything you need. Our amazing team has many years of experience and access to loads of invaluable resources that can help you elevate your search engine rankings and turn your online presence into a force to be reckoned with!

If you’d like to know more about all the ins and outs of how our inbound marketing plans can boost your business, contact us today. We’ll create your free Digital Marketing Plan that will highlight the specifics of how our services are guaranteed to help general contractors like you get solid, long-term results.