SEO in the construction industry requires a mix of local, on-page, off-page and technical organic search skills to maximize your ranking potential. The right balance between these skills and tactics for your business depends on yours:
- Objective (regional vs. national).
- Type of company.
- Availability of resources.
- And the growth targets.
While the above factors will help you tailor your SEO strategy to your individual needs, you need a solid foundation to build on.
Here are four areas that contractors in the construction industry should know in order for your residential construction company to be successful in their search.
1. required OnSite content areas for residential construction companies
Your website will have sections aimed at prospects and customers. Here are four areas where your website needs to invest the most to be successful:
Floor plan or house plan pages
The most popular sections of construction company websites are usually the floor plan pages.
Selected product pages
Residential construction companies work with a variety of vendors and contractors throughout the construction process. These suppliers have an influence on the buyer’s decision, as the quality of the supplier’s materials is associated with the buyer’s perception of the brand. Home building companies that have clear product information on their website can use this to their advantage to ensure that the buyer feels confident that they are using high quality products. These pages are helpful from both a search engine optimization and sales process perspective.
Building process
For residential home builders, it is important that buyers understand the lengthy, multi-step process of building a home. You should consider creating an infographic, guide, videos or a series of articles describing this process. Most of this content is typically documented internally, but homebuilders who can make this content available to the public (even if it’s somewhat abbreviated) will help educate and qualify buyers during the sales process.
Blog content
Homebuilders will have a hard time from an SEO perspective if they don’t have a section on their website dedicated to fresh, educational content for homebuyers. For tract or spec homes, this content should focus on the financing and selection process for the existing home. For home builders of owner-occupied homes, the content needs to cover a wider range of topics, such as:
- The search for a plot of land.
- Preparation of the property.
- Financing.
- Cooperation with the building contractor.
- The inspection of the house before moving in.
- And much more.
2. SERP functions for building owners
The high involvement and long process of buying a home creates multiple opportunities to show up in various SERP features.
Local package
The first steps to improving your local SEO presence should be to optimize and verify your Google business profile(s). This should be done at the local office or branch level, and you need to create a profile for each location (sales office or municipality). After optimizing your GBP, you should now focus on generating 5-star reviews through a review building program, which will help you rise in the local SERPs.
Knowledge package
Each of your communities (for contractors) or sales offices (for contractors on your property) can come up with a customized knowledge package. The knowledge pack is packed with location information (provided by your Google Business profile), user-generated questions and answers, reviews (from Google and third parties), related social profiles and more.
Image package
The highly visual nature of new homes offers builders the opportunity to appear in image packages. Image packs usually contain images from the builder’s website as well as repurposed images from home building aggregators, YouTube and local publications. In addition to high-quality photography, homebuilders need to invest in content distribution and a PR strategy to share their visual creative assets across multiple channels.
People also ask
There are dozens of frequently asked questions that are answered for prospects and clients about the process of buying and building a home. If you have a helpdesk, much of this information can be taken from there. In any case, FAQs on your website can help your website appear frequently in the SERP features of People Also Ask (PAA). By implementing the FAQ schema, you give the search engines a signal and give your website the best chance of appearing in the PAA SERPs. The FAQ schema is relatively easy to implement, depending on the CMS.
3. off-page SEO opportunities
Construction companies usually have a lot of link building opportunities because they are well connected with vendors, partners and organizations in the community. Here are two off-page opportunities you can invest in.
Link building
Construction companies have relationships with suppliers, trade partners, vendors, other contractors, real estate agents, customers, media and people in the community. The scope of these relationships is even greater when it comes to national or regional construction companies that are represented at several locations. Housing association marketers should create a list of potential link building opportunities in their CRM and make sure there is a process in place to get a backlink from any website you have a relationship with.
Structure of reviews
Generating positive reviews on third-party websites or on Google is one of the most effective off-page SEO opportunities for your company. If you complete projects with buyers, you should have an automated system in place to encourage customers (who are satisfied or have a high Net Promoter Score) to leave reviews on Google and other sites that collect contractor reviews. If you’re using your CRM to its full potential, keep track of customers who have left you 5-star reviews so you can work with them in the future to create case studies, rely on them for reference calls, or potentially sell to them again in the future.
In addition to an automated system for requesting reviews, you should also offer your sales team incentives for writing reviews. Online reviews are worth their weight in gold, and you should reward your sales team for getting the customer to leave their online review. Many review portals prohibit incentivizing your customers to leave reviews, but there are several creative ways to make it easy for them to do so.
4 SEO mistakes to avoid
The list of common SEO mistakes is long. Here are two that construction companies should avoid:
Hidden content
Larger construction companies have more sophisticated CMS features that allow for greater personalization and localization of content. Although this can be useful from a UX perspective, you need to balance this with Google’s ability to crawl your website. If you hide certain content from users in certain locations and Google has no way of crawling this hidden content, then you risk this content not being included in the Google index.
Problems with outdated content
The other big mistake that is more common with builders is having an excessive amount of content that is outdated and needs to be redirected when all the homes in a community are sold. New communities tend to generate inbound links to new communities from local news and other sources when they are announced to the public. With a 301 redirect to a relevant category or city page, you have the best chance of retaining the link value built up under the URL. Alternatively, you can refresh the page and tell the visitor that the municipality is no longer available, but that they should check the list of nearby municipalities.
Conclusion
As you can see, there are a variety of skills and resources that construction companies need to stand out in local and organic search. As competition in this space continues to increase, construction companies that have a strong local and national SEO presence, a system for generating 5-star reviews through local channels – and most importantly, an enthusiastic following of satisfied customers – will have the most success in the SERPs.