As of 2023, there are about 3,776,498 construction business in the US, and the number is increasing constantly. This makes it more than ever important for contractors to invest in marketing strategies to outrank their competitors. This is where SEO for contractors comes in.
Construction companies are typically B2B and B2C focused. With changing marketing trends, it has become challenging for them to reach their target audience.
If you are finding it difficult to generate enough traffic for your construction business, then relying on contractor SEO will probably be one of the most cost-effective solutions for you! These results-driven SEO strategies can help you bring more quality traffic to your site and rebuild your reputation in the construction industry.
Want to know more about what SEO is for contractors and the strategies that can help enhance your online presence? Then keep reading this blog post till the end!
What is SEO for Contractors?
SEO for contractors is a process involving a range of optimization tactics aimed at improving the contracting business website’s visibility in search engine results.
It uses relevant keywords related to the contracting companies so that the business gets in front of the potential customers who are searching for it. Contractor SEO goes beyond keyword research and content optimization. It also entails off-page SEO, technical SEO, and local SEO efforts for enhancing the business’s web presence.
Why is SEO Important for Contractors?
SEO is an effective online marketing strategy that works well for contracting businesses. By incorporating SEO in your business, you can not only improve your site’s visibility on search engines but also get more clients.
Check out some other benefits of incorporating SEO into your contracting business.
- Improves Brand Awareness
If your contractor’s website is optimized for relevant keywords, then your business will be continually exposed to those who are looking for contractor services or companies. Thus, SEO helps businesses in gaining recognition and reputation.
- Drives More Quality Traffic
Another benefit that SEO offers to your contractor business is that it helps drive more quality traffic to your site. When you optimize the site for SEO, its online visibility increases, so more people can find your business in the Google search results. Since your web page ranks for relevant keywords, it drives more traffic to your site which has a better chance of conversion.
- Helps Gain a Competitive Advantage
If you want to stay ahead of your competitors in the construction industry, then SEO can help you with this. All you need to do is provide high-quality, relevant, and more informative content than your competitors. This will help you outrank some of your biggest competitors.
- Better Conversion Rates
SEO improves the visibility of your contractor’s website and positions it higher on search engines. Thus, making it easier for the audiences to find their website. As SEO brings in more visitors to your site, it increases their chances of conversion into happy clients.
- Enhances User Experience
Contractors who optimize their sites for SEO can ensure a better user experience. If your site has faster loading speed, useful content and easy navigation, it will improve your site’s UX. So, if the technical aspects of your site are optimized, it enhances your site’s usability for users as well as for search engines.
Top 12 SEO Strategies to Boost Your Contractor Website’s Online Visibility
In this modern marketing realm, if you want to attract more customers to the contracting business, then implementing SEO strategies will probably be the best option. Executing these strategies in the right way will ensure that your site gets the most clicks and rankings from the search results.
We are discussing top 12 SEO strategies that can help boost a contractor website’s online presence in the search engine results.
- Conduct Extensive Contractor Keyword Research
Conducting comprehensive keyword research is important for contractors as it reveals what terms your potential audience is using to search for your business. Keyword research is the process
of discovering and analyzing those search terms that audiences are using to look for the information online.
By choosing and targeting the right keywords, you can target the right audience who want to know more about contractors.
While doing keyword research, it is significant to classify the intent of the users for more relevant keyword findings. This will also help you with targeting relevant audiences throughout the buyer’s journey.
Some commonly targeted keywords depending upon the “search intent” include:
- Informational Keywords: For audiences looking for more information. Example – “Benefits of choosing local building contractors
- Navigational Keywords: Usually for those audiences who are trying to find any specific website. Example – “best contractors near me”
- Commercial Keywords: Exceptionally for those potential customers who are in the process of conversion, but need some more time. Example – “best contractors for remodeling”
- Transactional Keywords: For targeting potential customers who are likely to take the final action. Example – “cost of hiring contractors.”
Also, it will be a wise option to target long-tail keywords, rather than short-tail keywords. These long-tail keywords are much more specific and thus target specifically those people who are interested in what contractor services you offer.
For discovering more relevant and quality keywords, you can use various keyword research tools like Google Keyword Planner, SEMrush, Ahrefs, etc. Additionally, prioritize those keywords that have high search volume and medium-to-low competition.
- Optimize Your Website for Local SEO
Enhancing your contractor’s web pages for local SEO is incredibly important as 46% of the Google searches are related to local businesses. Local SEO for contractors is an important tactic that helps improve the visibility of a construction business in the local search results.
Google rolled out local SEO in 2016 when it started ranking business websites for geo-specific searches. Here ranking is mainly done on the basis of the three factors- relevance, proximity, and prominence.
The online visibility of your website can be enhanced in local searches by optimizing Google Maps listings. In addition to this, by updating your GBP profile and listing your general contractor business on online directories, you can improve your local presence in the search engine results.
By leveraging the power of this custom contractor SEO strategy, your business can drive more traffic from local areas. These local SEO strategies also help you dominate the local market.
- Enhance Your Google Business Profile
Optimizing your Google Business Profile (GBP) is also vital while conducting SEO for contractors. In fact, it is much more significant than enhancing the local business listings as it’s a Google-owned property.
If the contractor’s company has an active presence in Google-optimized business listings, it will help you with gaining an advantage over your competitors. In fact, when someone is conducting their search online regarding any contractor-related queries, your website might appear at the top of the SERPs if it has an updated GB profile.
Thus, with Google Business Profile optimization, your business might also get an appearance in the Local Map Pack (a special section in the Google search results that displays three local businesses).
Here is how you can optimize your Google Business Profile:
- Ensure that the relevant keywords are included in your business description and category
- Include as many photos as possible in your GBP
- Don’t forget to include your website’s URL, business hours, and contact information in your profile.
- Acquire Backlinks to Boost Your Website’s Authority
An off-page SEO strategy that really works for contractors is link building. It involves acquiring quality links to your site from other authoritative websites on the same domain.
Google recognizes quality backlinks as a source of authoritative and trustworthy content. Acquiring these backlinks also refines the relevance and accuracy of its search results.
Want to know some tips on effective link building? Follow the roadmap given below:
- Guest blogging: It helps with sharing relevant expertise on contractors and those working in the same industry. It is undoubtedly a great way of collaborating with others in the same industry. By sharing insightful guest posts, the contractor site garners quality backlinks and it helps them gain higher authority in the industry.
- Building local partnerships: It involves collaboration of the contracting business with local construction vendors, suppliers, and local architects. By partnering mutually with other contracting businesses, you can yield valuable backlinks from their sites.
- Getting engaged in local community events: By taking active participation in local community events, your contractor site can earn more backlinks. So, try to get engaged with local media or event organizers in order to acquire quality backlinks from their site.
- Render the power of testimonials: Another way that can help out is to leave reviews and testimonials regarding the contractor business on the site. You can encourage some satisfied clients to do so. Ensure to get genuine feedback from these clients so that the site gets more credibility and link backs from other platforms.
- Fix broken links on other sites: Try to identify some broken links on other sites. Target those sites from whom you want to acquire links, and then notify the website owners regarding this broken link. Ensure to offer them for some replacements.
Thus, with the help of trusted backlinks on the contractor’s site, you can seamlessly elevate your search engine optimization opportunities.
- Create SEO-Optimized Content for Contractors
Content creation is an excellent strategy that involves creating unique, relevant contents for the site. So, focus on creating SEO-friendly content for the contractor website. This form of inbound marketing proves quite useful for contractors as it helps them in targeting the right audience to their website. Thus, it is often used while performing contractor SEO.
Also, you need to craft your blog posts and informational articles on topics that answer your audience’s questions. Focus on publishing content on a consistent basis as it creates opportunities for making your website more discoverable for people.
In order to stay organized, you need to create a content calendar. This calendar will help you with planning when you need to create different pieces of content and when to publish it.
Creating content for a contractor’s website is not just enough, you need to focus on making it compelling by optimizing its visual appearance so that it can attract more clients.
Take a look at these tips to help contractors stand out in this industry:
- Optimize the File Size of the Images: Make sure that the size of the images on site are optimized, that too without compromising their quality. Doing this will enhance the site’s loading speed and will positively affect the user experience.
- Give Keyword-rich File Names to the Images: Always try to give descriptive file names to the images embedded on the site. Ensure that the file name reflects the content and includes your targeted keyword. Avoid using any generic file names for the image files.
- Include Alt-Text to the Images: Always ensure to incorporate keyword-rich alt text to the images. This will help users understand the context of the image when the images are not loading properly. Even it helps search engines index their images properly.
- Ensure that the Content Meets the E-E-A-T Standards: Make sure that the content on the site meets Google’s E-E-A-T standards. It must align seamlessly with the user’s intent. Thus, it will help you stay ahead of the other local businesses.
- Optimize for Mobile Users
Mobile-friendliness is another effective strategy that should be focused on while doing SEO for contractors. If the site works well on all devices, then it will achieve higher rankings on search engines. So, ensure that the design of the contractor’s website is mobile-responsive and meets all search engine requirements.
This will also help target an increasing number of audiences who are using smartphones for conducting research. If your site is mobile-friendly and offers an enhanced experience to users on their tablets and smartphones, it might also positively affect your brand identity.
You should focus on improving its functionality for mobile devices so that it loads quickly and restricts mobile users from leaving your site.
Here are some quick tips to check out for optimizing your contractor’s site for mobile devices:
- Always rely on a responsive design that can easily adapt to any screen size
- Design your website using a mobile-first approach
- Minimize the use of pop-ups for easy navigation on the site
- Choose mobile-friendly fonts (Sans-serif) for the site to make it more scannable and readable
- Optimize the images on the site so that it seamlessly fits the mobile screen
- Use a CDN or Content Delivery Network to enhance the loading speed of the site
- Incorporate touch-friendly buttons and menus on your site
- Make different screen-size adjustments and resolutions
Implementing the above-mentioned tips will surely help optimizing the site for mobile devices. However, you need to test your site on various iOS and Android devices to ensure whether it works well across all devices.
- Utilize Social Media Platforms
Social media is not exactly a direct ranking factor for search engines, especially when it comes to contractor SEO. However, social media can indirectly help your site gain a higher engagement rate and improved brand awareness.
If the implemented SEO strategy is integrated well with social media, it helps contractor business gain maximum online visibility in the search results. Begin with optimizing all your business social media profiles.
Verify whether your social media profile’s bio, images, and posts are related to your construction business or not. Make sure that the contents on the site are captivating enough to compel the audience’s attention.
Focus primarily on optimizing the site’s social media updates. This can be done by incorporating relevant trending keywords in your social media posts. Ensure to include viral hashtags, eye-catching images, and viral headlines on the web pages.
Have a look at some other social media strategies that can enhance the contractor site’s SEO:
- Post regular updates on multiple social media platforms
- Create informative, crisp, and engaging content for social sharing
- Embed social media feed on your construction company website
- Try to acquire more links by connecting with influencers, being more responsive to comments and reviews, etc.
- Incorporate relevant keywords in your posts strategically
- Ensure to build social media backlinks
- Use Online Directories and Citations
When the contractor business gets listed on reputable online directories, it improves your site’s local SEO. Also, it helps in improving the contractor site’s ranking on search engine results pages.
According to a report by Bright Local, businesses that usually rank on the #1 page of the local search results have on average around 80 citations to their name. This suggests how important it is for your local businesses to get found on Google.
So, be sure to include the local citations of your contractor’s company on online directories like Yelp, Yellow Pages, Angi, Home Advisor, etc. Doing so will display your company’s updated NAP (name, address, phone number) information online. Implementing this local SEO strategy will also make it easier for your potential customers to find your business.
However, you need to ensure that the information included in your local citations should be the same throughout all your directories and sites. This helps Google and other search engines understand the details of your business and accordingly, they can help connect to your target audience.
The more the number of citations that your business has in the right place, the easier it becomes for your target audience to find your business.
- Encourage Customer Reviews
While performing SEO for contractors, you need to encourage your satisfied customers to leave some positive reviews regarding their services.
If search engines find some positive reviews regarding your business on third-party sites, it not only builds your site’s credibility but also boosts your company’s reputation.
So, it is good if some suitable automated systems can be set up for outreaching those clients and asking them to leave reviews. Ask to leave reviews on different sites like Yelp, New Home Source, Houzz, etc.
You can also retain those clients who leave positive reviews on your site by keeping track of them. In fact, you can also rely on them for customer reference calls or build case studies along with their help.
So, getting positive reviews on your site is a coherent way of boosting your company’s reputation.
- Optimize for Voice Search
By optimizing your site for voice search, you can improve the site’s appearance for voice search queries in the top search results. On average, more than 57% of the users opt for voice search option to locate the nearby businesses.
So, with voice search optimization, you can target more prospective customers who might be using other languages for making their search queries.
In case you are not using this contractor SEO strategy, you are missing out on huge opportunities to target your local customers. Because most of the users who use voice search option mainly deal with “near me searches.”
Once you get to know how useful this SEO strategy is for promoting your construction company, you must be planning to implement this on your site. Here are a few tips that can help you with optimizing your site for voice search results:
- Voice searches are usually conversational or questionable in style, so try to modify your content accordingly. This will make your content easier to rank for voice searches.
- Try to attract your audience’s attention by ranking your site for featured snippets. This increases your site’s visibility for any virtual assistant’s search results.
- If your contractor’s company shows up in the GBP listings, it will help your site rank higher in the voice search results.
- Analytics and Tracking of Site’s SEO Performance
Monitoring and analyzing your site’s SEO performance has become inevitable because of the dynamic nature of search engine algorithms. By tracking your site’s performance from time to time, you get to identify what technical issues your site possesses and the strategies to improve them.
You can measure the success of your SEO efforts by tracking some key performance indicators (KPIs). These KPIs can be your contracting website traffic, organic rankings, conversion rates, etc. This also provides valuable insights into how excellent the contractor SEO strategy is working for your business.
Another way in which you can measure the effectiveness of your SEO practices is by tracking engagement metrics like time on page, number of page visits, etc. This also provides insight into your construction website’s user engagement.
Irrespective of what metrics you choose for tracking, you should ensure that it aligns with your contractor’s company goals. You can also use some SEO tools to monitor your site’s SEO performance.
Tools like Google Analytics to monitor the organic web traffic of your site and SEMrush to assess the current SEO performance of your site.
After analyzing your KPIs, you will get to find some SEO strategies much more beneficial than others for your construction company. You need to replace these strategies with the ones that don’t work well.
- Use Video Marketing
Video marketing is one of the most popular and trending digital marketing strategies that can help you improve your contractor SEO. By creating short testimonials and educational videos, you can gain your audience’s attention.
When you add professional videos to your site, your goal is to highlight the features of your contractor’s company. However, educational videos are added to the site to provide your potential clients with some valuable knowledge regarding your contracting business.
As video content is more impactful than text content, it continuously attracts the audience to go through your content.
Moreover, you need to implement various techniques for optimizing your video content. This includes adding relevant keywords in the video, adding timestamps, appealing thumbnails and hashtags, using end screens and cards, etc.
Thus, apart from boosting your brand awareness among your target audience, it also plays a vital role in increasing your customer engagement.
How to get started with video marketing?
- Understand the needs of your target audience
- Determine your video marketing goals
- Decide what type of content you will include in your videos
- Set a timeline for sharing the video
- Choose the best platform as per your industry and from where you can gain the best audience response.
Once done, now you are ready to communicate your brand message through creating videos.
These strategies altogether comprise the contractor SEO process. Following this process will help your construction company gain more local visibility and higher search engine rankings.
Take Your Construction Business to the Next Level with SEO!
Contracting businesses nowadays leverage SEO for contractors to strengthen their site’s online presence. This has led them to rely on several SEO strategies to outgrow their competitors and attain long-term success.
If you also want to take advantage of SEO to boost your business’s revenue, then you can implement the strategies discussed above. However, executing those strategies requires proficiency in SEO knowledge. In case you don’t have relevant SEO knowledge, don’t feel helpless. You can also hire a professional SEO company to establish your dominance in the construction industry.
They can help you by providing top-notch contractor SEO to scale up your business to new heights.
