Understanding search engine optimization is important for every business, including construction services. Whether you’re looking for the best home builder SEO services or the best roofer SEO services, you need to go into it with an understanding of how optimizing your site is going to help you grow.
The following are five of the general things construction, roofing, and related businesses need to know about SEO right now.
1. What Is SEO?
If you haven’t already started integrating SEO best practices into your business, what is it?
Search engine optimization or SEO is when you work to get your website and content to rank higher in search engine result pages (SERPs). You can’t pay Google to rank well. It’s organic. You can pay for advertising, but that’s a different concept from organically ranking.
If you’re a construction services provider of any type, when you rank well on Google, you’re going to attract the attention of more customers. You are essentially working on ranking higher in search engines so that more leads can find you online.
2. Managing Onsite SEO
There are three main areas of SEO that construction businesses should understand. The first is onsite.
Onsite SEO’s primary goal is to put keywords in the right spots on your website so that you’re creating relevant content for your targeted audience.
Onsite SEO involves keyword research, content creation, such as informative blogs and videos, and on-page optimizations. On-page optimizations include title tags, alt tags, and meta descriptions. These are all things that can help Google’s algorithm figure out exactly what your page is all about.
3. Off-Site SEO
Off-site SEO is about increasing your site’s authority. You can think about off-site SEO as building an online reputation for your business. You want to have websites that are talking about your site and linking to you in positive ways.
Link building is a big part of off-site SEO. When other sites link to yours, it’s like a vote of confidence. You can do link-building outreach and also focus on creating helpful, valuable content so that other sites naturally want to link to it.
Other elements of off-site SEO can include things like online reviews. You need to set up your Google My Business page and then directly ask your customers to provide you with reviews. When you have reviews, it improves your Google My Business page. That then helps you rank higher in what’s called the Map Pack. Around 90% of people also read online reviews before deciding on a business.
4. Local SEO
Local SEO isn’t relevant for all businesses, but if you’re in construction, roofing, or similar businesses, it is important because you want to attract local clients.
Local SEO can involve elements of on- and off-site SEO.
Local SEO starts with location-based keyword research. For example, you might have keywords like “(your city) roofing contractors” or “(your city) remodeling experts.”
With local SEO, it’s often advisable to choose action-related keywords. For example, you might include terms like near me, because these are the keywords that show someone has intent. People with the intent to hire are who you most want to attract to your site.
Google algorithms follow a different pattern for local search. People seeking certain types of businesses need the results to be from their immediate area, so the search algorithm takes into account a proximity factor.
That basically just means that your location is being taken into account when you enter a search query with local intent. This can happen even when someone doesn’t include a city name or actionable phrase like “near me” in their search.
Along with location-based keywords, having your business listing in Google My Business is especially important for SEO.
5. Technical SEO
Technical SEO is just one of many reasons it tends to work with a professional on your website SEO. It gets complicated, and you might be able to do some of it on your own, like creating blogs, but there are going to be a lot of areas you probably need help. Technical SEO is an example of one of those.
Construction companies and related local services providers often don’t have huge websites, so technical SEO might not be their biggest priority, but it’s still relevant.
You want to make sure you have a responsive and mobile-friendly site. That means that it can be viewed on any device.
While Google doesn’t formally announce ranking factors, it has made it very clear that page speed is incredibly important. They’ve announced that page speed is part of how they rank sites, so you can’t overlook this. You can check your site’s speed with a tool like Google PageSpeed Insights.
The slower your site, the higher your bounce rates. Google sees this as you providing a poor user experience.
A site that’s optimized for mobile and is going to meet Google standards for the delivery of a good user experience will have little or no redirects and will have no interstitials.
The overall user experience needs to be excellent. An interstitial is an interactive page or a popup on a website that loads between one page and the next or as a user scrolls. These interrupt the navigation through your website and can be problematic in terms of user experience and, therefore, SEO as well.
For good technical SEO, along with having a responsive and user-friendly site, it needs to be well-organized. Your pages should all be just a few links from one another. A web developer can help you with this. You want a consistent URL structure, and using breadcrumbs navigation is very SEO-friendly.
Breadcrumbs navigation automatically ads internal links to the category and subpages that make up your site, which helps to improve your architecture.
If you want to expand your construction or remodeling services businesses, one of the best ways to do so is to get more people to find you. To do that, it might be time to invest in SEO.
