When you started your construction business, you probably thought you’d be, well, doing construction. You expected your duties to include managing your crew, working with clients, and maybe even spending some time getting your hands dirty on the job site. You probably didn’t anticipate sitting behind a computer trying to figure out how search engines work.
SEO, which stands for search engine optimization, is a critical, sometimes confusing topic for many small business owners who want to enhance their company’s online traffic and search results. Whether you’re independently pursuing better SEO results, or consulting with an expert, if you plan on utilizing a website to promote your business to prospective clients, SEO is a necessity. Because most people gravitate to only the top five results, without a high SEO ranking, your company’s mission and information will fall into the unseen laundry list of similar search engine results.
Fortunately, boosting your business’s SEO isn’t impossible. Here, we’ve provided the most vital concepts to understand, and strategies you can implement to put your construction business on the virtual map.
–
What Exactly Is SEO?
SEO, in laymen’s terms, mainly affects the visibility of a website in an organic, editorial, payment-free environment. The goal with SEO is to get your company listed on the primary results page, where thousands of consumers and inquirers can view your information.
Your SEO composition will include the entirety of text on your website, and it’s meta-data. This meta-data consists of the tags on photos, the descriptive information used in your website’s generative code, and more. Search engines such as Google preview tenfolds of information when deciding what site or information profile best fits a specific search.
–
How Can You Improve Your SEO?
Improving your SEO is a longitudinal process; in part because Google and other search engines change their search algorithms regularly. What they once considered a top SEO technique, such as single keywords, may become less influential. In fact, some methods that once rocketed websites up the results page now send them spiraling to the bottom.
Users not only must take time to implement SEO on their website but continually learn how SEO has changed. While in the beginning, you might spend more time working on your website than on the construction site, there are also short-term strategies you can perform to enhance your SEO.
–
Be Mobile-Friendly
More and more consumers are browsing the internet on their smartphones, tablets, or other devices instead of their computers. If your website isn’t mobile-friendly, you’re losing traffic potential. Fortunately, with responsive coding, most sites today can be viewed automatically on various devices. This type of coding can change your website’s visuals, depending on the viewer’s technology, to adjust to fit different screen parameters.
If you built your small business website on a platform such as WordPress, chances are it’s already responsive. If you hire someone to create your site, make sure to specify it should be mobile-friendly.
–
Content Is King
Today, SEO primarily focuses on quality of material; you should write for the people viewing your site, not the search engines that rank it. Ensure that your content is informative, comprehensible, and not composed of keywords. Adding new, relevant content on a regular basis can also build your SEO. For most small businesses, updating content in blog-form is most common. If possible, update your site, and add stimulating new information, once a week.
Add anything relevant to expanding an initial search: blog posts about innovative projects, new equipment, your plans to expand, construction industry news, even consumer deals. Don’t wholly avoid specific SEO keywords, such as location, but always make sure what you’re writing is focused on the problems, interests, and inquiries of the consumer populous.
–
Understand Your Keywords
What are keywords, anyway? They’re the words that search engines use to match up your website with a user’s search. If someone searches for “construction companies in Albany, New York” and your website includes those keywords, it will return as a result. Include keywords in your meta-data, and at least once in your content — just make sure they sound natural. Using “construction companies” three times in two sentences is not going to sound natural!
To get an idea of what keywords to include on your website, think big picture; connect your company’s mission, services, and knowledge-base with hypothetical consumer questions. You might ask outside sources how they would phrase their searches, too, so you can get a variety of different ideas.
–
Ask Clients for Reviews
Ask your clients if they will leave you reviews on websites such as Yelp, Google or on your social media profiles. Reviews often help drive traffic to your site. Don’t forget to claim your business’s listings on these sites too, so that you can respond to reviews under your company name.
–
Include Your Contact Information
Finally, include your business address and phone number on your website to increase its result rate for local searches. Many companies have a footer that contains this information — a multi-beneficial feature that allows prospective customers to contact your business while also boosting your SEO demographically. Alternatively, other companies provide a separate page explicitly listing their contact information.
While there are unlimited opportunities and strategies to enhance your SEO, these are some of the most comfortable methods beginners can utilize to improve traffic, and ultimately boost your business exposure and client base.
–
