What is Contractor SEO?
Contractor SEO is the process of optimizing a website for contractors to increase their visibility in search engines.
This can include improving the site's content, structure, and on-page elements like titles, metatags, and anchor text.
Contractor SEO can also involve developing off-page optimization strategies like link building and social media marketing.
Why is SEO for Contractors Important?
There are a number of reasons why contractor SEO is important.
The most obvious reason is that without it, your website will not rank as high in search engine results pages (SERPs).
This means that you'll miss out on potential leads from people who are searching for contractors online. Contractor SEO can also help improve your website's visibility in local search results, which is important for contractor businesses that rely on local customers so it should definitely be a core part of your marketing strategy.
Brand awareness is another important benefit of contractor SEO. When your website ranks high in SERPs, it sends a signal to potential customers that you're a credible source for their needs. This can help you build trust and credibility with your target audience, which can lead to more leads and conversions.
Content Marketing for Contractors
Content marketing is a great way for contractors to improve their website's Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
By creating high-quality website content that's relevant to your target audience, you can not only attract more visitors to your site but also rank higher in SERPs.
Most of the website content that is present on a contractors website is either copy for service pages or local page content, targeting the specific town or area the contractor services.
Many contractors miss the opportunity of producing valuable blog content on their website and answering their customer's questions through blog articles.
A contractor's blog should be a repository of valuable information for their customers, and over time this will help to increase the website's authority as an expert in the field.
If you are answering customer questions or general questions that are not present on other websites, you will get a better Unique Information Gain Score in Google. This is a patent.
A good blog does not only answers questions though, it creates relevance. Google looks at these articles as a way to understand what your website is about and how much experience do you have.
Do You Want More Customers?
If you are looking to generate more customers, check out this guide and learn how.
You'll find 5 steps that will help fix the most important things on your website today!
Creating Topical Relevance on Your Contractor Website
Creating Topical and Local Relevance is a crucial part of any custom contractor SEO strategy.
You can create topical relevance on a service level and on a local level on your contractor website.
On a service level, you can talk about the types of services you offer, what each service includes, and how it's performed.
You can also talk about the technologies you use, the materials you prefer, and any other relevant information that will help your customers understand what you do and how you do it.
On a Local level, you can have a blog post on every town or city you service.
In these posts, you can include information like the types of services offered in that area, what type of customer lives there, what the weather is like, and any other local information that might be helpful to your potential customers.
Contractor SEO Keyword Research
Finding the right and relevant keywords to target is essential for a good contractor SEO campaign and it should be the first/second part of the contractor SEO process.
By targeting the right keywords, you can improve your website's visibility in the SERPs and attract more potential customers who are searching for contractors in your area.
Finding these keywords is not a hard thing at all, but it requires some time and Search Engine Optimization Knowledge.
There are a number of tools and techniques that you can use to find the right keywords for your contractor business, but we will give you a quick guide on how to do it.
Step 1: Choose a Tool
First, you want to choose a tool that will help you find the right keywords. There are a number of options available. There is Google Keyword Planner, which is free, but unless you have an active Google Ads campaign running, it will only give you limited data.
Our choice is Ahrefs which is a paid tool, but it offers much more data than the Keyword Planner. It also has a keyword research feature that can help you find keywords related to your business.
Step 2: Write up Your Services
You will have to do keyword research around your services. Write down a list of the services that you offer and pop these into the keyword research tool of your choice.
These can be like: "contracting company, best contracting company, contracting services, general contractors, general contractor services".
Write up all of the ideas that you have and use a keyword research tool to hone down on them.
Step 3: Write up Your Local Areas
Once you have found a list of keywords related to your services, you will want to research keywords for each of your local areas.
To do this, you will have to write up which local areas you would like to target. We recommend going from bigger areas to smaller areas.
For example, if you service the entire state of Texas, start by researching keywords like "contractor texas" and then move towards Houston. After that, you can go even more granular, like targeting areas inside Houston, even street names.
How deep you go into targeting these areas is up to you, but we recommend going as deep as possible as most of these smaller areas although they have a lower search volume, they are very easy to rank for in Google.
Step 4: Find Informational Keywords
The final step is to find informational keywords. These are keywords that people use when they are looking for information about contractors, but they are not ready to hire anyone yet.
An example of an informational keyword would be "how much does it cost to remodel a kitchen".
Steps one through three will help you find your main money-making keywords, but you will want to find a few informational keywords to add to your list as well.
Brainstorm what your customers could be searching for, reverse engineer your competitor's website in order to find these informational keywords.
With the right call to action on your blog, you can easily turn this informational traffic into SEO leads and paying customers.
Technical SEO
Having a well-optimized website is essential for any contractor SEO campaign.
There are a number of technical SEO signals that your website must tick, in order to rank well.
Although a lot of local terms are very easy to get good keyword rankings for, still you need to have a technically sound website if you want your contractor SEO campaign to be successful.
Importance of Website Speed
A very important technical SEO signal is website speed.
Google has to crawl billions of pages every single day, so how fast can it crawl your website and how much data it has to download directly affects your website's ranking ability.
Google also looks at speed as a User Experience signal. If your website is slow, people are not going to stick around for long and will leave your website and they don't want to show a website that doesn't have a good user experience.
If your website takes too long to load, you will lose potential customers as well. In this day and age, no one has the patience to wait for a website to load.
The most common issues when it comes to website speed on contractor websites:
- Having a Cheap Server
- Too Big Images and Files
- Loading of unnecessary CSS & JS files
- Improper Caching
- Embedding Third-Party Scripts (YouTube, Chat Bots, etc.)
You can use tools like Pingdom and GTmetrix to check your website speed and see what you need to do in order to make it faster.
We also recommend using Page Speed Insights from Google.
Having a Good Core Quality
In order to rank well in Google, you must have a Good Core Quality. What is Core Quality? At Slothio, we use "Core Quality" as a term for the general optimization of the website.
Having a good core quality means your website passes all of the general audit signals, like:
- No Meta Issues
- No Heading Issues
- No Thin Content
- No Technical SEO issues
- No Duplicate Content
- No Redirect Issues
Your website shouldn't have any of these. These might seem small, but they add up, and once you gather hundreds of them, it will start to affect your website's ranking.
Website Crawlability
In order for Google to understand your website, first, it has to find it and then it has to crawl it.
How well and how fast can it crawl your site highly affects how well you rank in the organic search results.
There are a few things you can do to make sure your website is Crawler-Friendly:
Use Internal Links
Make sure your website is well-linked internally. Google crawlers do not only use links from other sites to find and crawl your website, they also use internal links on your website to find inner pages.
Make sure you interlink pages that are topically aligned and also use silos.
Fast Load Speed
Site Speed affects how well Google can crawl your website. Make sure it loads fast.
Have a Good Site Architecture
Make sure your website is easy to crawl by having a good site architecture. In fact, your SEO strategy should start with this.
Your site architecture should not only make sense to your users for navigation, but it should also please the crawlers as well.
This means that your site structure should make sense logically.
Your pages also shouldn't have a big page depth. If your pages are too deep, crawlers will have a hard time crawling them.
This is a good example of an acceptable page depth:
service.com/service/location/
This is an example of a bad site structure:
service.com/category/service/sub-service/example/location/
Optimized Robots.txt file
Your robots.txt determines what pages of the website are allowed to be crawled by search engine crawlers, and which pages should be ignored.
It is crucial that you make sure your robots file contains only the necessary information for crawlers to crawl your site correctly.
Blocking certain pages in your Robots.txt can help with optimizing your Crawl Budget.
Structured Data (Schema)
Structured data markup is a way to tell search engines about the content on your pages. It's like adding labels to your content so that Google can understand it better.
By using Schema, you can tell a lot of information to Google, without it needing to read the content on your page.
There are a lot of Schema types that you can use, but the most important are Person, Organization, Local Business and Service.
We will cover how you can set up structured data for your business in a future article.
Link Building
Link building is the process of acquiring links from other authoritative websites to your website. It is one of the most important parts of an SEO Strategy.
Google has always used links as a ranking factor, and it still does.
The more high-quality links you have pointing to your site, the better chance you have of ranking higher in Google.
There are many ways to build links, but we will cover a few that are easy to do for most contractors.
Broken Link Building
Broken link building is the process of finding websites in your niche that have broken links, and then contacting them and suggesting one of your pages as a replacement.
This works really well because you are providing value to the site owner by fixing their broken link, and you are also getting a backlink to your page.
Guest Blogging
Guest blogging is the process of writing guest posts for other websites in your niche.
Not only will this help you get exposure to new audiences, but you will also be able to get a backlink from the website you're posting on.
Local SEO For Contractors
Local SEO is the process of optimizing your website for local search.
This means that you optimize your website so that it appears in the local search results for your area.
There are a lot of things you can do to improve your local SEO, but we will cover a few basics in this article.
One of the most important things you can do for your local SEO strategy is to claim and verify your business listing on Google.
You can do this by going to google.com/business and clicking the "Start Now" button.
Once you have claimed your business, make sure you fill out all of the information correctly, including your address, phone number, website and more.
After you have filled out all of the information, Google will send a postcard to your business address with a verification code on it.
Once you receive this code, enter it into Google My Business page and your listing will be verified!
It is also important that you claim your business listings on other sites such as Yelp, Angie's List, and others.
Local Citations
Creating local citations is one of the main ways of letting Google know about your local business.
Having your Business Name, Address and Phone (NAP) on other websites, online directories show Google that you are a real contracting business and it can connect the dots about it.
You can easily register your contracting business in local business directories or you can hire a Virtual Assistant to do it for you.
The most important thing is that the data like NAP, opening hours have to match on every single website, so make sure you save the website logins if you need to update these.
Reviews
If you want more leads from your local market, you must have reviews on your Google My Business page.
Reviews on your GMB is one of the ranking factors that will help it get to the first page. Make sure you ask your customers to leave a review on your page, preferably with your keyword in the review.
How to Structure Your Contracting Business Website?
In order for local businesses to show up for local keywords in the search engines, your website must have a good structure.
This means that you must have service pages and local pages.
Service pages help search engines like Google to understand what services you offer, while the local pages connect the service pages to your physical location.
The best way to structure your website is like this:
example.com/remodeling/ - service
example.com/remodeling/new-york/ - local service
With that said, don't go and create thousands of pages with the same content, because you will easily get penalized.racting Business Website?
Tracking SEO Results for Contracting Businesses
Tracking the results of a contractor SEO campaign is crucial. How else will you know if your efforts are paying off?
There are a lot of different ways to track the results of your SEO campaign, but we will cover a few that are most important.
Google Analytics
One way to track the results of your SEO campaign is by using Google Analytics.
Google Analytics is a free tool offered by Google that gives you detailed information about the traffic to your website.
You can see how many people are visiting your website, where they are coming from, what pages they are visiting, and more.
Google Search Console
Another way to track the results of your SEO campaign is by using Google Search Console.
Google Search Console is another free tool offered by Google that gives you information about how your website is performing in Google search results.
You can see how many impressions your website is getting, what keywords are ranking for your website, and more.
Keyword Tracking Tools
A keyword tracking tool is a paid (there are some free ones) tool that helps you track the position of your website for specific keywords.
This is important because it allows you to see how your SEO efforts are impacting your rankings for specific keywords in the search engines.
Tracking Leads
Let's be honest. Organic website visitors, ranking keywords, these don't matter if you are not generating leads.
In order to know your SEO campaign is successful, you need to track how many leads you are generating from organic traffic each month.
The easiest way of tracking your leads is through Google Analytics Goals and Google Tag Manager.
You can track anything that is happening on your website from people submitting a form to downloading a PDF.
Once you have set up tracking for your goals, it will be easy to see how many leads you are generating from organic traffic each month.
Here is a detailed video on setting up lead tracking:
Frequently Asked Questions
Does my contractor website need SEO services?
It's easy. Yes, your website needs contractor SEO Services. SEO is the best type of investment you can make since once your contracting company is on the first page of Google, it will generate leads for free.
How much does SEO for contractors cost?
Every contractor SEO agency charges different rates for their SEO services, but the average price is around $1,000-$2,000. If an SEO Company promises you they will rank you for $99, just avoid them.
If you decide to do SEO on your own, you can get away with spending $500-$750 a month on SEO and get good local results.
How to choose an Contractor SEO company?
Choosing an SEO Company is not that easy. You are investing a lot of money, after all. The worst thing that can happen is you invest a lot of money for 12 months and results are just not coming.
The best way to tell if an SEO company is good or not is to see if the SEO Strategies they put together are custom or not. Every business is different, so should be every SEO strategy.
