A ton of construction companies I talk to just don’t have the time to carry out a flawless SEO effort, because they’re too busy running their company.
- They think Construction SEO has to be hard.
- They spend too much time on the little tiny parts of Construction SEO and thus miss the forest for the trees
- They don’t hammer the absolute most important parts of SEO and get lackluster results and burn out before getting to the playoffs.
This guide will help you avoid the pain of defeat, and get carried on your teammate’s shoulders, holding that giant glistening trophy (100’s of leads a month if you put in the years of effort required.)
People actually under-estimate what’s possible with real SEO dominance, because they’re pale and shriveled up next to shitty expensive, shared HomeAdvisor leads, or have got so used to spending $10,000 a month in ads on Google that they’re convinced ranking has to be hard.
It’s not hard… it just takes a long time.
It’s not hard… it just requires consistency, and knowing where to push.
It’s not hard… you just can’t keep on trying for 3-6 months and quitting, when Gold is just on the other side of that wall (in momentum and compounding benefits.)
The Role of SEO in a Construction Company’s Marketing Stack
What role does SEO play amongst all the other methods of marketing?
It’s slow…
It can be insanely powerful…
If you’re an owner, and one person show: Going all in on SEO can be a major competitive advantage.
If you’re a marketer, and need a low cost (though perhaps time-intensive) method for getting more leads SEO works if you go hard.
If you’re part of a team – one of the first 3 hires at a construction company in the marketing department would either be an SEO Specialist or a SEO Writer. (Perhaps you could find someone who is both!)
- SEO should be mixed in among the other things that may bring shorter term results (like social media, video, lead-buying, and referral efforts.)
- SEO should be outsourced if your main marketing person is not an SEO specialist, and has a lot on there plate besides just lead generation focused marketing (like brand building.)
- SEO in major markets, or mid-sized cities is basically extremely important, and thus if you have any shot of ranking for terms with a lot of searches, you should go hard to do so.
Whatever it takes.
So what does it take then?
Part One: Start with the basics: Is your website well-structured, fast, easy-to-use, and interlinked?
Technical SEO starts with a fast clean coded website.
This is the equivalent to the fundamentals in a Football or Basketball game, can you dribble well, do you have a good grip, do you know how to navigate between the opposing players?
Important Play: Technical SEO for Construction Companies
- Not using a slow, clunky commercial theme.
- Installing WP Fastest Cache, or Nitropack to cache the website and load it on a CDN.
- Minifying your code, and optimizing your images.
- Making sure your website isn’t super visually messy, things are easy to find, and it’s one-click to get them where they want to go.
- Linking from blog posts to service pages, and adding more internal links to all of your most important pages (particularly from all your top trafficked blog posts)
Part Two: Do you have the right content & are you expanding your content regularly with questions your best prospects might have?
Content marketing starts with finding topics that you have a shot at ranking for, and creating the most useful piece of content on the internet for that subject.
Think of this as the Alley-oop in basketball, or the quarterback in Football. You don’t win games without a great quarterback. Sometimes the QB has to do a run play – think of that as content without linking efforts (part three), and ideally we’re hitting regular throws (content marketing + linking effort.)
Important Play: Content Marketing for Construction Companies
- Ask your sales people or use your own understanding, of what specific questions keep coming up in the sales process and make a list of those. Start blogging with the best piece of content on each of those subjects!
- Use Ahrefs, SEMRush, or Google Keyword Explorer (in Google Ads) to find what kind of demand there are for certain phrases (how much are people searching what you think they might be searching.)
- Do competitive analysis (with Ahrefs – pop a site into Site Explorer) find what they are ranking for and look at companies like yours in different or bigger cities and the types of topics they are ranking for, and steal those topics and take a new fresh angle on the subjects.
- Get a blogging habit (at least 4 times a month) or have a writer write about these topics and post them on your blog with a compelling featured image to promote them on social after you publish.
- Use alt tags, subheadings, bolded sentences with the keyword in them, and monitor Google Search Console for what the blogs rank for over the next 3-6 months, continually doubling down on what’s working and expanding your topics with your increased understanding about what ranks and what doesn’t.
Part Three: Are you leveraging GMB, local directories, PR & guest posts to get more links (signals your website is important?)
Part of turning your website into a traffic magnet is not just building from inside.
It’s also getting other websites around the web to point at your website (with links) and say ‘that’s good stuff!’
Certainly – making good stuff is the #1 method for doing that…
But damn that’s slow.
That’s why I believe GETTING LINKS is the star wide receiver of ranking on the internet. It’s the power forward jamming the ball at the 1 second mark. It’s the star of the show that some people disdain, but that wins championships.
Not everyone can win. But those that take every conceivable competitive advantage (while remaining ethical) will dominate in the end.
Important play: Link-building for construction companies
- Fill out everything on your Google My Business to the T, get great reviews, and post on GMB at least once or twice a month.
- Get at least 100 local directory listings (example service = Yext, but there are cheaper and better options.) These should all have the exact same Name, Phone Number and Address on them.
- Write and distribute a press release (Example / Option: Fiverr Press Release Service)
- Get natural guest posts from reputable companies.
- Ideal scenario – you can also just message sites in your niche and ask if they’d be open to you writing a blog post for them, then just link back to your site in the blog somewhere.
- The link text matters, and ideally is a mix of your brand name, your brand name + service, the exact phrase you want to rank for, the URL, and random text like ‘Click here’ or ‘Read more.’
Be very careful about linking with the exact text you want to rank for very often, but consider doing it on your most powerful links. I also love brand + keyword for top links, and cover your tracks with A LOT of brand, URL, and random link text.
Overall – this is the most powerful, but also scary method. Google says not do any link-building whatsoever, and so you need to make sure what you’re doing feels natural and the best way to do this – is to also have people NATURALLY linking to you.
My favorite ways to get natural links?
- Write statistics posts
- Create aesthetic infographics and promote them, while also inviting people to use them on their site.
- Write anything that a writer would use to support there points (they find these resources and may link back.)
- Get on a ton of podcasts.
- Do things that are newsworthy.
- Create a brand reputation worth talking about!
Choose a company like Hook Agency to carry out the Construction SEO Playbook
Hook Agency believes you should OWN YOUR MARKETING.
We actually care – and we mean that. When we have a client that’s not getting results as quickly as we hoped, we stay up at night and lose sleep over it. We get anxious on the weekend. We double down on what we know to do when we have to.
We collaborate together, with a team of experts that are completely focused on GOOGLE.
We only work with contractors and home services businesses, so we have a ton of context on the types of keywords that actually make money.
We get the NETWORK EFFECT of working on companies like yours and bring that wisdom and context to your account.
So give us a call now – to get a free consultation about our process, or schedule a meeting today to get started.
