Digital marketing is crucial for any contracting business looking to build an online presence, generate leads, and reach its target audience. It’s no surprise prospective customers look to the internet, especially search engines when searching for various services. Hence, the online environment is vital to reach your potential customers and promote your business.
However, enabling your contracting business to appear in Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) doesn’t happen at the snap of a finger. It takes the consistent application of a robust search engine optimization (SEO) and marketing strategy to earn a spot on the first page of search engine rankings.
Therefore, you must leverage contractor SEO to boost your leads and customer conversion rate for your contracting or construction business. This article will provide a complete guide to using a custom contractor SEO strategy to improve your online visibility, enhance your lead generation, and attract potential clients to your business.
What Is Contractor SEO?
Contractor SEO refers to the various search engine optimization and digital marketing strategies employed to increase your site rankings and draw organic traffic to your business. It uses relevant keywords related to the contracting and construction industry, content marketing strategy, on-page, and off-page SEO and other effective SEO strategies that enable potential customers to easily find your website when they search the internet.
Contractor SEO services help generate high-quality leads by putting your business in the face of new customers seeking contractor services online. An optimized SEO strategy can improve your website’s visibility in local searches, bringing qualified leads to your business.
Search engines are run by specific algorithms that dictate how your website is found via online searches, how it crawls your website copy, meta tag, and indexes the contents on your site. Hence, you must use various custom SEO strategies to be on the positive end of these algorithms.
Why You Should Engage Search Engine Optimization in Your Contracting Company
Studies have shown that 75% of ideal customers never go beyond the first page of a Google search. Therefore, if you want to achieve good search engine marketing results by attracting qualified traffic to your website, you can’t afford to rank on the second page of organic searches.
Contractors or construction companies must leverage different SEO techniques to make their digital presence more visible, available, and valuable to old and new customers to have a competitive edge. Aside from getting steady traffic and maintaining a good position on search rankings, there are many other benefits to engaging SEO in your contracting business. Below are some of the major benefits of SEO for contractors:
Increased Brand Awareness and Client Base
A good SEO and digital marketing technique enhances online user experience by improving your website’s design, content, speed, keyword rankings, and responsiveness, thus contributing to the overall visibility of your business. The easier it is to locate your local contractor business, the faster your brand awareness will increase and attract your target audience.
Merging SEO for contractors with content marketing draws quality traffic to your company and makes the various services you offer known to the public. Once you begin to receive frequent engagement on your website, the more likely it is for Google’s algorithm to connect your brand to various primary or location-based keywords.
Lower Marketing Budget in the Long-run
SEO for contractor websites is usually cost-effective because its efforts are concentrated on users who actively need the services of a contractor or construction company. Contractor leads obtained using SEO efforts are generally more qualified due to the nature of inbound marketing.
While you may have to invest more capital at the beginning of your SEO campaigns, you stand to gain a higher return on your investment when compared to other digital marketing tactics. This is because search engine marketing constantly produces results without investing more money.
Therefore, with contractor SEO strategies, you get new commercial clients organically within 6-12 months, eliminating the need for a larger marketing budget in the long run.
Gives a Competitive Edge
SEO for contractors can help your business stay ahead of the competition by identifying online issues your business faces on a regular basis and providing solutions to improve commercial leads while achieving your contracting business goals. The contractor SEO process is designed such that you get to identify evolving search queries while adjusting your keyword data and providing fresh content to maximize these opportunities.
A commercial construction company that can flag new opportunities when they present themselves and optimize for them will have the greatest advantage in search engine result pages. Hence, you can generate more commercial construction leads and edge your competitors in accumulating organic search traffic.
Generates Higher Return on Investment (ROI)
SEO helps you optimize your website to soothe the demands of your target audience and also helps you create content that addresses your customers’ search intent. Thus providing you with an excellent way to attract traffic over time and increase sales.
The return on investment derived from SEO lead-generation efforts is significant and noticeable because optimization will be carried out periodically. Hence, your business will be able to gain industry authority over time. Once your contractor website gains momentum in search engine result pages, it will easily rank for high-value keywords and higher traffic, which will invariable result to more revenue inflow.
5 Contractor SEO Strategies to Turn Visitors Into Leads
Generating leads via search engine optimization is centered around attracting meaningful traffic that are eventually converted to customers. This implies targeting your website’s visibility to audiences more prone to engage with the contracting services you provide. Here are five ways to convert visitors into leads using contractor SEO:
1. Optimize Your Website for Users and Search Engines
Creating a responsive and authoritative contractor website that enhances users’ experience and meets search engine requirements is crucial to increasing the leads coming to your construction business. A website that infuses functionality with attractiveness, loads quickly, and is friendly to PC and mobile users will increase brand identity and reduce the bounce rate (the number of users that fail to visit other pages on your site).
However, creating a functional website is not the only thing necessary to increase your website’s visibility. Optimizing the technical aspect of your website is also important. This involves ensuring the URL structures are well optimized; you operate on a secure server with an SSL security certificate and have a fast loading time.
Expertly engaging the technical aspect of your contractor website ensures there are no technical issues that can prevent it from being understood by search engine bots and also prevent it from ranking perfectly.
2. Conduct a Contractor Keyword Research
Conducting keyword research helps you identify the terms your potential customers are searching for, determine their competitiveness, and ultimately influence your local SEO strategy. To attract the right leads to your business, thorough keyword research must determine your primary and long-tail keywords.
When the pages on your website contain the right words, your business will have the opportunity to rank well in search engines for specific queries and topics. Your keywords must address the two primary keywords that describe user intent. They include:
- Informational keywords: These keywords are used when potential clients are looking for information about a product, service, or guide. You can entrench informational keywords in blog posts and articles to meet user search intent. Informational keywords usually take the form of “How,” “Why,” “What,” etc. Examples include: How do I identify electrical faults in my house?
- Commercial keywords: These keywords are used by customers looking for a specific construction service. Their usage often indicates a strong desire to request such services, and being able to rank for these keywords provides a valuable o[opportunity to reach your target audience. Examples of commercial keywords for contractors include: “electrical contractor,” “house painter,” “gardener,” “matte vs. sheen paint,” etc.
3. Perform Contractors Local SEO
95% of consumers perform online queries via mobile devices, and 45% search for businesses in the area. Local SEO is a very powerful tool for contracting businesses offering local services in a specific location and seeking to sell their services online.
Local SEO for contractors aims to increase local rankings on search engines. 2019 saw Google begin to rank business websites based on prominence, proximity, and relevancy for geographically connected searches.
Consequently, your general contractor website will be more likely to be found online if it is close to the location of the search, offers services or items that the user may be looking for, and has a Google Business Profile.
Listing your general contractor business on online directories and getting positive customer reviews also improves search rankings. Creating a Google My Business Profile is completely free. Just be sure to fill in the accurate details. You stand a chance of elevating your online presence when you unlock the secrets to effective local SEO for contractors.
4. Craft Optimized Web Content
Content marketing is a customer acquisition technique that involves producing, publishing, and disseminating SEO-friendly content relevant to your target market. In contrast to traditional advertising, content marketing showcases the knowledge and authority of your company while also telling potential clients how excellent your contractor services are.
By implementing an effective SEO strategy, construction companies can achieve consistent brand resonance across all digital touchpoints. Content marketing is a win-win strategy that puts you in a successful online position because it:
- Enhances customer trust and brand reputation
- Generates high-quality content that drives traffic
- Increases social media engagement
- Improves conversion with high-quality leads
- Establishes backlinks and increases website authority
82% of marketers actively employ content marketing to have a competitive edge. Both search engines and prospective customers gain traction with consistent content marketing. You can facilitate your lead generation by creating high-quality user-generated content that features evident calls to action.
5. Generate Internal Links and Link to Other Sites as Well
Link building is an integral aspect of off-page search engine optimization for contractors. It entails acquiring hyperlinks from other websites to your own. The more credible websites can link to yours, the better your performance in a search for relevant queries. This is because Google views each hyperlink on your website as a vote of confidence.
Links are also essential to drive referral traffic and help develop relationships. Different link-building strategies include submitting your website to online directories, curating fresh content about your services, volunteering to write guest blogs, and investing in some PR to feature on other websites or social media channels.
You can also use marketing software like Ahrefs, which has a built-in link-building tool to help you find high-quality backlink opportunities.
Blogging is another effective link-building technique. Blogs can generate internal links, produce new content, and receive listings and external links from other blogs.
Always ensure that the websites that link back to yours are reputable and the content you create is worthwhile. You won’t see positive effects if you have backlinks from poor-quality websites or publish thin content.
Is Hiring a Contractor SEO Company Important?
A great digital marketing company will inform you that your investment in contractor SEO is tangible. The saying, “You have to spend money to make money,” comes into play when considering hiring a contractor SEO company. However, you must spend money wisely, and allocating a budget for SEO services is a smart, long-term investment.
Icepick is one of the top-rated SEO companies with a five-star review from UpCity. We are renowned for increasing our clients’ organic traffic using analytics, content marketing, and various other aspects of SEO. We’ll deliver the results you need to grow your business. Contact us to learn how our contractor SEO services can enhance your business and generate leads that will become customers.
Summary
There is no indication that SEO will become obsolete anytime soon. Thus, be sure to get on the digital marketing bandwagon and start building a successful online presence! For contractors, taking advantage of SEO’s benefits is more crucial than ever. Our SEO experts at Icepick can help you with any SEO needs, including technical website optimization, backlink building, local SEO, and keyword research.
Are you curious about how we can support you? For a consultation, get in touch with us right now.