The Ultimate SEO Strategy for General Contractors
Can you even remember a time when you had time to flip through the Yellow Pages to find general contractors that you could hire? It wasn't so many decades ago that people had to wait to get answers to their questions. Nowadays, the masses rely on search engines like Google to provide them with instant answers to all of their questions. From finding a great contractor to learning how to design an addition for your home, Google has an answer for you.
In a recent study, it was revealed that there are 3.5 billion Google searches conducted every single day. When looking at the top search terms that people utilize, "near me" is a very popular one. This means that many people are looking for products and services in their local area. As a small business owner, this should be a lightbulb moment that showcases a new marketing endeavor for your business.
Unfortunately, many small business owners are overlooking search engine optimization strategies just because they don't quite understand what they entail. It's time to make optimization a part of your digital marketing strategy so that you can be successful over the long term. The more optimized your website is, the more often you're going to show up in the organic search results and the more customers you're going to have coming in your door.
If you're ready to make optimization a part of your digital marketing strategy, we're going to share with you the top tips on how to assemble the ultimate strategy to boost your general contracting business's revenue and client base.
It Starts With a Website Audit
Before you attempt to implement any sort of optimization strategy, you need to have a clear understanding of where you're currently at. The best way to do this is to start by getting a website audit. This can be done by having a bot crawl your website. The bot will analyze your website similar to the way that search engine bots do.
An optimization audit of your website should be done to do the following:
- Alert you of any broken links and 404 internal errors
- Share if any of your headings, meta descriptions, and title tags have target keywords in them
- Make sure that your content is compliant with Google's current algorithm practices
- Identify any duplicate or “empty” content
- Verify if your website is up-to-date and providing industry relevant information
As you get an assessment of all the information above, you can determine where your website needs to improve to enhance its ranking in the search engines.
Researching Keywords
The search terms that visitors to sites like Google utilize are referred to as keywords in the digital marketing world. Search engines use these keywords to connect searchers with information that they're looking for. They do this by analyzing websites to see what relevant keywords they have so that they know which website should be connected with what searchers.
The key to a successful website ranking is to have relevant keywords for your industry throughout the content on your website. You can get the most utilized keywords for your industry by utilizing online resources like Google Search Console or the Keyword Planner. Both of these places provide traffic data and analytical metrics that help to showcase the most in-demand keywords for the general contracting industry.
Once you discover what the most popular keywords are, you want to include them throughout your website content. This means incorporating them in your title tags, blog articles, meta descriptions, headings, and so forth. Incorporating these keywords isn't too difficult to do. In fact, we're going to share some page title examples below to help you understand how easy it is to utilize these relevant keywords in the page titles for your own website.
- Home Improvement Specialist in St. Paul
- Professional General Contractor in Edina, MN
- Twin Cities Bathroom Remodel Expert
- Kitchen Remodeling Contractor in Minneapolis
As you can see, you want to spread different keywords throughout the various page titles of your website so that you get search traffic for all these different general contracting services.
Writing Original, Relevant, and Shareable Content
Another important aspect of ensuring that your website ranks at the top of the search engine results for relevant general contracting search terms is writing content that is relevant and original. Google values its searchers and only wants to connect them with websites that it truly believes has the information that they're looking for.
Google does not want to risk losing future searches from users by connecting them with a website that has generic or duplicate content. For this reason, it's imperative that all the content you write for your website is both unique and relevant to the general contracting industry. It's typically easiest to think about this as writing a book. Your target keywords are going to be your chapter titles, and your content will elaborate on those keywords.
You can deliver content in many different fashions, including blog articles, testimonials, and infographics, video tutorials, and so forth. It pays to get creative and mix up the various types of content that you deliver to your website visitors. Just make sure that you maintain the same message, tone, personality, and information across all pages of your general contracting website.
Optimizing Off-Page Tactics
If you want to be sitting at the top of the search engine results page for various terms relevant to your industry, you also need to work on your off-page optimization tactics. This helps to go above and beyond to showcase to Google that you are indeed an expert in the general contracting industry and that customers will enjoy being connected with your business.
Some of the most important essentials to your off-page optimization include:
- Backlinking
Ask any digital marketing expert what the most valuable off-page optimization tactic is, and they'll reveal that it is backlinking. This is where other credible sites link out to your business's website. Each link is essentially providing you with another layer of credibility to the search engines. - Citations
Going beyond simply linking to your website, citations are another great way to build up your reputation and trust for the search engines. Citations are simply the mention of your company's name and contact information on local directory sites. - Interlinking
Apart from just having regular content on your website, you also need to have interlinking. This is the process of creating links from one page to the next to help users of your website navigate to the section that is most pertinent to what they're looking for. - Google My Business Profile
It's likely that you've seen those information boxes that pop up on the search engine results page that tells you some key information about a particular business. These are called Google My Business profiles, and they allow you to provide accurate information about your business to help searchers get in contact with you. Having one of these profiles helps to add another layer of credibility to your company's website in the eyes of the search engines.
When you're able to successfully utilize both website optimization and off-page optimization tactics, you can position your company's website to rank highly in the search engines. This translates to more leads for your business and a stronger online presence.
SEO Tactic Specialists For General Contractors
While learning about how to create the perfect optimization strategy for your business can be exhilarating as you think about all of the added customers that you can potentially get, that may wear off quickly. As soon as you actually think about the process of implementing these tactics, you may be hit with a sense of overwhelm. Running a general contracting business is a full-time job. Let Triton Commerce take care of your digital marketing needs.
At Triton Commerce, we have the knowledge, staff, and tools to create and implement the best custom search engine optimization strategies for your business. Contact us today to get a copy of our free Digital Marketing Plan that explains in detail how we increase your website rankings and bring more customers into your business.