Word of mouth referrals are great, but if you want your contractor or construction business to succeed today you’re going to need a website that’s optimized and working hard to bring you leads. Keeping up-to-date on the latest SEO tips can be a full time job, but you can still stay competitive and relevant as long as you follow some SEO best practices.
On-page SEO Tips for Your Contractor Website
SEO: Search Engine Optimization. The practice of optimizing your website to improve your rankings on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).
To put it simply, SEO means doing what you can to help your website get found online when people search for your specific company name, product, service, or offering. Ready to optimize? Here’s where to start.
Get Your Site Up to Speed
The #1 thing you can do to improve your page rankings is to increase your site speed. Have you ever clicked on a website and then waited around as it loaded, loaded, loaded…? Not many people will have the patience to wait for your site, bouncing to your competitor’s website instead.
How fast should your site load? Your audience expects your website to load in under two seconds. If it takes longer than 3, expect your visitors to jump ship and go elsewhere.
Regularly check your site speed using tools such as PageSpeed Insights.
Stay Focused on Singular Page Topics
If you’ve been trying to learn about SEO then you’ve undoubtedly heard about keywords. Keywords are the words or phrases that people enter into a search engine to find a result. Things like “plumbing contractor, Las Vegas.”
Whenever someone enters a keyword into a search engine, the search engine tries to determine the intent behind those keywords in order to return the best possible results to the searcher.
As you optimize existing website content and add new pages and blog posts to your site, you can help Google understand how you match up to a user’s search intent by keeping your focus on a single topic or keyword, per page.
Each page on your site should focus on one particular topic. If you try to cover too many topics on any single page, it will lose its importance and authority as search engines struggle to determine what the page is about. This is most often a problem found on a homepage, where it’s very common for too many keywords/ topics to be covered.
Rather than listing all of your services, previous projects, and content information on one page, be sure to give each one their own specific, dedicated page.
When you create a blog post, be sure to cover one topic extensively, rather than touching on multiple topics in one post.
Keep URLs Clean, Short and To-The-Point
URL’s are one of three elements that appear on the search engine result pages (SERPs) (the other two are your page title and meta description). So you want to be sure you’re not scaring away potential leads with URLS that don’t inspire confidence.
URLS should be clean, short, and clearly communicate what a user can expect if they click on it.
- Keep it short. Search engines can process long URLS, but shorter ones are easier for people to share, copy, paste, embed, and understand.
- Match URLs to page titles.
- The first 3- 5 words of your URL are given the most weight by search engines, so use your keywords up front.
- Remove unnecessary characters, punctuation, or numbers to keep it clean and easy to read.
Your contractor website may automatically generate URLs whenever you create and save a new page or blog post. In these instances, the URL will automatically match the page title. There’s really no need to go in and manually change the URL in this instance. Just be sure that your page title is precise and includes the topic or keywords that page is focusing on.
Grab Attention with Titles and Headers
Titles and headers tell your audience and search engines what your page is about. They should be extremely clear and concise.
The first element potential visitors to your website see on the SERPs is the title of your web page. A page title should be very specific and include the keywords or topic for that specific page. You can also include your business name, separated by a pipe.
For example: Remodel Contracting Services | JBI Building, LLC.
Headers are used in the copy of your contractor website pages. For the human visitors to your site, headers help break up blocks of copy and make your site easier to read and use. For search engines visiting your site, headers are another signal about the purpose and topic of each specific page.
To please both humans and search engines, use headers that grab readers’ attention and support your overall page topic.
Use Alt Text to help Search Engines “See” Images
Search engines can’t see the images you’ve placed on a page the same way visitors to your site can. But you can help search engines understand what that picture is by including keywords in the image filename and Alt text. Before you upload images, rename them from “Img.0045.jpg” to something like “jameson_electrician_contracting_services.jpg”
One of the most commonly overlooked (and easy to remedy) SEO fixes is simply adding ALT text to website images.
Get Blogging
Does your contractor website have a blog? You don’t have to be an experienced writer to create great blog content. Write about what you know. Use free spelling and grammar checkers like Grammarly to edit your work before you post it.
Begin by identifying your audience. Are you targeting homeowners who want to remodel existing homes or build new ones? Or is your audience a general contractor or construction company that uses subcontractors? You can use your blog to offer your audience information and solutions to their problems.
Your blog is more than just a space to put words on a page. A blog post can do the following:
- Bring qualified leads into your sales funnel
- Build awareness of your brand
- Educate, inform, or delight website visitors
- Help search engines better understand your website
- Provide content that you can share on social media
Optimizing your contractor website really comes down to building a better experience for the people who visit your site. As a result, the people who are looking for your site may actually find it. You don’t have to be an SEO wizard to have a well-optimized contractor website. Just keep these tips in mind and you’re on your way to winning the SEO game.
