Traditional ways of marketing your contracting business aren't as effective as they used to be. Your customers now turn to the Internet to find contractors in their area instead of cracking open the yellow pages or asking a friend for a recommendation. This makes your online presence one of the most crucial parts of growing your business.
SEO for contractors is the most cost-effective and scalable tactics to put your company in front of your ideal customers when they need you. Being the first company that they see can have a significant impact on your business since ~40% of people will only talk to one contractor before making a decision.
Keep reading to learn everything you need to know about contractor SEO! These SEO tips are the foundation for creating a recurring stream of qualified traffic that will generate more leads, phone calls, and MRR.
What is SEO for contractors?
Search engine optimization, or SEO, is an online marketing strategy that involves optimizing your website and specific pages to rank higher in the search results. There are thousands of searches on Google every day by people in your service area for keywords that are highly relevant to your business.
Ranking highly in search boosts your visibility and drives qualified traffic to your website. These highly motivated visitors want to find a solution to their problems and are more likely to end up doing business with you.
Why is investing in SEO for contractors a good decision?
If you've ever wondered if SEO is right for your contracting business, we've outlined the top 3 benefits of contractor SEO below.
Boost brand awareness with your ideal customers
The simple truth is that customers can't do business with you if they don't know you exist. However, you can reach your target audience by showing up in the search results for important keywords. Leveraging SEO helps improve your rankings so your target audience can get more familiar with your brand.
Clearly track & measure the ROI of your SEO efforts
The key to growing your contracting business is to always know what your marketing budget is doing for you. This level of insight lets you know where your marketing dollars are best spent so you can maximize your top-line revenue. Tracking the ROI on your contractor SEO efforts is incredibly easy.
The primary way to see that your SEO is working is to look at your search engine rankings and organic traffic. If these two metrics are seeing consistent growth, you're on the right track, and you can attach a firm ROI using the time that went into earning that growth.
Drive down your total customer acquisition cost (CAC)
Each dollar you put into search engine optimization never stops working for you. Every piece of content you write, every page you optimize, every step you take, and every link you earn goes towards earning more traffic. And that traffic will build and build and build over the life of your business. Not for just a day or a single click like other marketing channels.
You can go from passively getting 1 - 2 leads per week to getting 20+ per week because of SEO. This enhanced throughput reduces the overall cost of earning a new customer and makes your marketing efforts more efficient and cost-effective across the board.
Follow these contractor SEO tips to grow your inbound traffic
There are a lot of moving parts that go into doing search engine optimization correctly. So many that it can be hard to know where to start and whether you're moving in the right direction or not, especially since it can take up to 6 months to see results.
Whether you're planning on handling it yourself or partnering with an SEO company for contractors, follow these tips to get started.
#1: Do some keyword research to find valuable keywords
Targeting the right keywords is the foundation of every contractor SEO strategy that gets results. Your potential customers are looking for your services right now and they're using certain terms and phrases to search for them. If you want to capture these prospects, you need to target the words your prospects are using.
They may be using terms like "contractors" or "home contractor services", but they could actually be looking for a plumber and you do flooring. Those keywords aren't a good fit since they're too vague and aren't relevant to your business.
You should focus on long-tail keywords since they're very specific and there's less competition for them. These are keywords that are three or more words long like "home tile flooring contractor" or "home renovation contractor".
These users know exactly what they want and you want to target them since they're more likely to convert than a person searching for "contractors".
If you want to get even more specific, you can add a location modifier to narrow the searches to homeowners in your service area. These are keywords with terms like "nearby" or "near me" in them.
These are your money keywords since keywords with "near me" in them have seen a 200% rise in traffic over the last few years.
#2: Build service pages
A major part of earning organic traffic is building pages that solve a problem or answer a question. For contractors, this means creating pages for the services you provide.
Your ideal customer needs help with a specific problem. While some users will do generic searches to find a contractor, most will be more specific to help them find the right person for the job.
For example, let's say that a homeowner wants to replace the flooring in their house. They're going to search for something like "home flooring contractor". They don't want to work with any old contractor or a generic handyman. They want someone a flooring specialist, and they expect to see flooring contractors in the search results.
Creating a page that covers your flooring services makes your business highly relevant to their search since it solves their needs.
#3: Build out your Google Business Profile
There is no better tool to help your contracting business get noticed than your Google Business Profile. These listings are one of the most powerful SEO tactics for contractors and it's also one of the quickest to put into practice too.
If you aren't familiar, Google gives every company a free business listing where they can add important information about their company. This includes things like your phone number, address, website, hours of operation, service area, services provided, and much, much more.
Making sure you fill out your business profile with as much information as possible should be your top priority, even if you can't fill out everything.
Google uses this information throughout its ecosystem, and one of the most important ways it does this is to determine your proximity to searchers. Why is this important? Because local searches heavily depend on proximity to the user.
Your contracting business doesn't need to reach everyone, just the people inside your service area. Specifying your physical address and service area on your business listing improves the relevance of your business when prospects in your service area look for your products or services online.
This makes it far more likely that your website will show up for these important searches and generate highly qualified traffic and leads.
#4: Improve your site load times
The way that users shop online has changed. Customers are savvier, have higher expectations, and are more impatient than ever. They expect to find what they're looking for quickly and to have an excellent customer experience at the same time.
Users expect websites to load within three seconds of visiting them. The longer your site takes to load, the more likely they are to bounce back to search. This likelihood skyrockets to about 90% when websites take longer than five seconds to load.
This isn't good for a variety of reasons.
Firstly, you're losing potential customers. They're leaving your slow website to go back to search and go to one of your competitors instead.
Secondly, it's going to hurt your search rankings. Slow load times mean high bounce rates, and high bounce rates mean dissatisfied users. Google's primary goal is to provide a positive user experience by delivering the best result for a searcher's query. If your website isn't creating a good shopping experience, Google will be less likely to show it for relevant search queries.
Quick ways to speed up load times
- Optimize image file size & file type
- Enable browser caching
- Minify HTML, CSS, & JS code
- Remove render blocking resources
- Improve server response times
- Use a CDN to deliver content faster
Ready to get started with SEO for contractors?
With almost 40% of customers talking to only one contractor before making a decision, digital marketing for contractors is more important than ever. There are only so many jobs out there. If you aren't one of the first contractors they see, you could be losing a ton of business to the competition.
By investing in SEO for your contracting business, you can earn more clients and cement yourself as the go-to contractor in your area.
If you aren't sure where to start, Hearth Marketing can help. Our team of experts can build an internet marketing strategy for contractors that drives results. We've generated over 1,389,310 qualified leads for our clients and we can do the same for you. You can rest easy knowing that your business is in good hands.
Ready to book more jobs? Get in touch with us today to schedule an obligation-free consultation with one of our strategists to cover our digital marketing services.
Additional Services
- Online marketing for contractors
- Marketing tips for contractors
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