Like any other industry, the construction industry faces massive online competition. From real estate companies to house refurbishment firms, the construction industry has a lot of players in the market ready to steal your clients.
As a result, construction corporations must create a winning SEO strategy to build site traffic and attract quality leads.
This article lists the top 8 SEO tips to help your construction company generate more organic traffic, leads, and higher search engine rankings.
Is SEO Effective for Construction Companies?
Yes, search engine optimization is an effective marketing tactic for construction firms because it helps to reach more potential customers searching for construction services online.
As your business obtains higher rankings for competitive, high-search volume keywords in Google and other search engines, you’ll likely see a jump in organic leads.
This jump in organic leads will result in more business inquiries and, ultimately, more revenue for your construction company.
Benefits of SEO for Construction Companies
Here are the top benefits of search engine optimization for construction companies:
- Improves brand awareness among your target audience.
- Helps drive relevant and targeted traffic to your construction website.
- Offers better user experience to your site visitors since SEO helps to create a user-friendly website with valuable content.
- Helps improve the local online visibility of your construction business.
- Enhances your brand authority in your niche and lets you outrank competitors.
- SEO is one of the most cost-effective marketing channels and can provide leads well into the future (given that you can maintain your rankings).
8 SEO Tips for Construction Companies
Here are the top 8 SEO tactics that will help your construction company rank higher on search engines:
Develop a Keyword Strategy
This entails finding the best words and phrases related to your business that your audience is likely to use when looking for construction products and services.
Construction businesses need to understand their customers in order to choose the right keywords. You need to put yourself in the customers' shoes to understand what keywords will align with your brand’s products and services.
To find the keywords around it, you should create a buyer persona that defines your prospective customers' demographics, needs, pain points, goals, purchase power, and concerns.
Image source: AWeber
You should also conduct a detailed competitor analysis to understand how your competitors’ websites are performing on search engine result pages. Understanding your competitors is essential to get a high-level overview of who you're competing against and what drives their traffic.
This process entails finding the keywords your competitors are already ranking for, and evaluating whether or not you'll be able to outrank our competitors.
SEOptimer's keyword research tool can be used to conduct a competitive analysis to see which keywords your competitors are ranking for.
Once you have a list of top keywords relevant to your niche, you need to sort the ones you can use in your content and on your website. Narrow down your list of keywords based on the keywords' search intent, difficulty level, and relevancy.
Once you've selected the keywords you want to target, make clusters of similar keywords for ease of use in your content and on your location or service pages.
Create Content Targeting Your Ideal Keywords
Content is essential to rank your website higher in the organic search results.
There could be various categories of services like residential construction, industrial construction, home extensions, kitchen remodeling, etc. You should create useful content and resources for each service that you offer.
As an example, a construction company offering kitchen remodeling services can create the following blog articles to answer any potential questions customers might have:
- How much does kitchen remodeling cost?
- How to select the right kitchen cabinets for your home?
- How to plan a kitchen remodeling?
- How long does kitchen remodeling take?
The title, heading, and meta description are vital elements that summarize your main content to the audience and search engines. Ensure you use your main keywords naturally in all three of these elements.
The first few sentences should include your primary keyword. This is so that Google immediately knows which keyword is most important.
Furthermore, you should place secondary keywords and synonyms evenly throughout the page to increase the relevance of your content.
The number one rule when it comes to content production is to follow Google’s EEAT principles (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness). This is a framework that is used to assess the quality of content on a web page.
Implement a Local SEO Strategy
Local SEO involves optimizing your website to improve its web presence in the local area that your business operates in.
To optimize for local SEO, start by claiming and listing your construction company on Google My Business,
It's really important that you remember to provide accurate business information in your GMB listing. Also, add real photos of previous projects so that potential customers can see your portfolio of projects.
Leverage localized keywords and phrases in your website location pages, blog posts, and social media updates. This will help your business appear in local search results and attract customers in your area.
An example of a localized keyword is "kitchen remodel Baltimore" - it consists of your primary keyword (kitchen remodel) and the location that you are targeting (Baltimore).
Additionally, use schema markup to help search engines understand your business information. Several schema types are relevant to construction companies, such as LocalBusiness, Organization, and ContactPoint.
Once you've added schema markup on your website, use Google's Structured Data Testing Tool to verify your schema markup is correctly implemented.
Ensure Your Website is Optimized According to SEO Best Practices
Using white-hat SEO techniques to rank your construction site not only saves you from getting penalized but also helps create a credible brand image.
Avoid using black or gray hat SEO tactics as it might get your website good outcomes in the short term, but will tarnish your brand image in the long term. It is essential to ensure that your website is optimized and follows all of the search engine guidelines.
This entails making sure your site is easily accessible by search engine crawlers. It is essential that your URLs are indexable so that Google can rank your pages for the appropriate search queries.
Another aspect of following SEO best practices is ensuring that on-page elements such as page titles, meta descriptions, header tags, and image alt tags include your target keywords and accurately describe the content on each page.
A big part of your SEO success will depend on your website's user-friendliness and usability.
This is where Google's PageSpeed and Core Web Vitals metrics come in. Since both these metrics are part of Google's ranking algorithm, you need to ensure that your website loads quickly and obtains good scores for all the Core Web Vitals checks.
You can use SEOptimer's SEO reporting feature to check both these metrics and to get recommendations on how to improve your PageSpeed and Core Web Vitals scores.
Build Online Citations
Online citations refer to mentions of a business's name, address, and phone number (NAP) on other websites, directories, and social media platforms.
Here is an example of a complete online citation provided by Urban Nyc Builders Inc. that shows the company name, phone, address, list of services, and website:
One of the most important elements of creating online citations is to make sure you provide accurate and up-to-date NAP information in all your online listings. This includes your Google Business profile, Bing Places, Yellow Pages, etc.
Image source: SEO Expert Brad
You can also build online citations by finding relevant construction-specific directories like ConstructConnect, HomeAdvisor, Houzz, and Essential Construction.
Additionally, you should encourage customers to leave reviews on your business listings and social media profiles. Positive reviews can help build your business's online reputation and increase the likelihood of future citations.
Build Service Pages for Your Construction Company
Location and service pages are vital to boost the SEO of your website.
If your business serves multiple locations, you should create a unique landing page for every location. Similarly, if you offer more than one service in the construction industry, then you should create a service page for each.
Creating relevant local pages based on your target keyword and its location will help you acquire relevant website traffic from locations where your business offers its services.
To build good location and service pages, make a list of the services your business offers and all the locations your business operates in. Perform keyword mapping to map a seed keyword to every target location and service so that you can create relevant pages accordingly.
Other than using the primary keywords on your location and service pages, you must also use synonyms and related words to increase the overall relevance score.
It's also a good idea to add a few commonly asked questions your potential customers might have (more on this in the next section).
If you want to convert more visitors into clients, then you should add engaging titles, headings, text, and images that keep visitors on your website and get them into your sales funnel. This can be achieved by adding a compelling CTA on all your pages.
Once all your locations are created, interlink them to increase the SEO link equity among the pages. For instance, you can have a page with all the listed locations where your business services clients. On this page, you can link to your individual service and location pages.
Here is an example of all the location pages listed in the footer of Detailz Construction Corporation's website:
Create an FAQ Section on Your Website
The FAQ section on your website is where you answer commonly asked customer queries related to your construction business and the services that you offer.
Having an FAQ section on your website offers two significant advantages.
- Increases the chances of your website ranking for question keywords and other long-tail searches.
- Gives the customer the ability to get the information they might require without having to phone in or look around on your website.
Here is an example of an FAQ page from ASL Remodeling, a kitchen remodeling company based in the Bay Area:
You can prepare a similar FAQ section that answers the common queries of the users.
Follow a Link Building Plan
Link building is an essential element of every SEO strategy.
An intelligent link building plan helps to improve organic search engine rankings, creates strong brand authority, generates referral traffic, and builds a strong network of connections.
To create an effective link building strategy start by performing competitor analysis and keyword research to create content, pages, and tools that your audiences will love and find useful.
For instance, you can add a "Construction Project Estimate Calculator" to your website that gives interested clients a rough idea of what it will cost to hire your construction company.
You increase your chances of acquiring links to your site by creating high-quality content and useful guides or tools, since people often link to helpful resources on the web.
To start building links, you can perform a backlink audit of competitors' links. This entails analyzing the backlinks that your top competitors have. A backlink audit will check the following:
- Which of your competitors' pages have the most links pointing to them?
- How many backlinks do your competitors have?
- Which anchor tags are being used to link to your competitors
- The quality of the websites linking to your competitors
Once you have a list of links that point to your top three competitors, you should prepare a plan to get a link from them. This can be in the form of cold outreach or guest posting.
Conclusion
SEO marketing is a highly effective online promotion strategy for construction companies. By implementing the above top construction SEO strategies, you can acquire more website traffic, improve user experience, and increase business inquiries.
However, SEO is not easy, and you need patience to see the results. The sooner you begin, the faster you will start generating organic leads.
