With the growth of the internet, it’s more important than ever to have a web presence.
To be part of this online community and stand out from the crowd, you must employ some basic Search Engine Optimization tactics.
Local SEO strategy promotes your company to nearby consumers while they search for similar items and services.
As a result, devoting time and money to local SEO may assist you in relying on local customers.
12 Local SEO Tips for General Contractors
Getting Verified on Google My Business
Google My Business has made it simple for anybody to be discovered online. It simply costs you time and effort.
Yes, that’s correct; you read it correctly. Google My Business makes it simple for anybody and everybody to get found on the internet without requiring any money or technical expertise.
Simply go to Google and apply for verification as a construction company. You can give the bots what they need to monitor you online, such as your company name, location, industry, ratings, and so on.
So let the algorithms assist you in growing your organic traffic by providing them with what they require.
Steps Towards Your Journey Of Google My Business:
- As soon as possible, create and check a Google my Business page.
- Within your account, use the “Create” and “Add” buttons to upload photos and text using Google Posts. This will increase your listing’s activity tenfold.
Seek authentic and genuine reviews from your local customers.
Adding a Map to Your Location
You must provide value to humans, and the bots appreciate local businesses that give it to them in the easiest manner possible.
As a result, when you add a map to your location, it informs the bots that you are clearing the road for future consumers.
Furthermore, having consistency in your company’s name, address, phone number, and place are critical.
To determine how correct are your NAP information and update any incorrect data on displayed sites, utilize local citation tools such as Mozlocal, Brightlocal, etc.
This helps customers reach your store and avail of your services effectively.
Moreover, You Can Add The Following Information Too:
- Opening and closing hours to ease the traffic.
- Valuable landmarks to help customers.
- A phone call link for contacting you directly on mobile phones.
- Social Media links to help customers share your services with other potential customers.
Now you know why having a map on your website is one of the wisest decisions for local SEO services.
Managing your Reviews
The voice of your brand is a customer review. They may have a far greater influence on your target consumers than anything you might ever say about yourself.
So, make sure you have reviews in your favor to attract more customers.
Tips To Get Reviews:
- Send an email requesting a review as soon as someone avails of your services. You can generate a review form or link in your GMB profile.
- Ask them to add the target keyword in your review if feasible.
- Add your company name and location in the comment if you respond warmly to your evaluations. For example, “We appreciate your feedback on [product/service] in [city, state]. We value your time and effort, and we look forward to serving you again. Thank you for taking the time to leave us a review from the [full company
Making Your Site Mobile Responsive
Google Search has established several recommendations for website builders.
Responsive design, for example, entails that the material on the website adapts to the size of the device on which it is viewed.
Even if youngsters have mobile phones, it is critical to building mobile-friendly websites, which means the material on your website looks great across a range of devices.
As a result, making your website mobile-friendly is one of the most important decisions you’ll ever make for your business.
Design or improve an existing mobile-friendly website with simple tools if you don’t already have one.
Tools You Can Use:
- Mobile-Friendly Test by Google Search Console would help you know how easily a visitor can use your page on a mobile device. Here’s an example tested to see if a site is mobile-friendly.
- A bootstrap is a free tool that allows you to make a mobile responsive website.
- FitText is another helpful software that helps make your website’s font-sizes flexible.
Pro Tip: Optimize the media employed on your website. This will assist in the page loading time and general appearance of your website.
Building Voice Search Optimized Content
Who doesn’t want to see a result for their search query without having to type/read it all?
According to Google Reports, 27% of the global internet population uses voice search on their mobile devices.
This is enough to prove that voice search is a major force in the world of e-commerce.
Today, if you can create voice search optimized content, there is no way anyone will be able to pull you down on the internet.
As a result, consider what your customer might ask for as a search query and how you would respond.
Other Valuable Tips To Make Voice Search-Friendly Content:
- You must write in a conversational tone so that when a person reads it, they find it relatable and understandable.
- Opting for bullet points or step guides for ranking on voice search.
- Identifying the right note by assessing your potential customer’s tone and disposition.
- Keywords should be used in your content to send positive signals to web crawlers.
- Building relevant FAQs to attract customers.
Tools To Find Key Phrases:
- Ahrefs keyword tool is a free tool that gives you thousands of relevant keyword ideas in seconds.
- Semrush is a paid tool that provides valuable keywords for any business.
- Google Keyword Planner is a free tool that all firms use to discover local short-tail and long-tail keywords.
Leveraging Advertisement
SERPs may be ranked organically as well as via paid advertisements. You’re there to offer products and expand your audience; you need effective tactics.
Types of advertising for general contractors:
- PPC Advertising: To advertise your services locally, use Google AdSense and set up campaigns. It allows you to achieve the top spot in SERP even before organic results are scored.
Facebook Advertising: One of the most efficient methods to pique your audience/customer interest is through social media advertising.
- LinkedIn Advertising: This platform is used by a wide range of businesses, including major corporations and millions of individuals, for advertising their events or sharing their experiences.
To get the most out of your internet presence, use platforms like Facebook and Google to reach new audiences.
Facilitating Link Building and Community Engagement
The greatest approach to improve in any area is to create a community for yourself.
It might be the assistance you receive on the road to success, or the individuals who work in the same industry as you.
You’re a general contractor, and you link to other contractors just like yourself to create a community that will back you up no matter what happens.
You may get help from this community by requesting that members link to your website, which will assist you to gain high-quality backlinks and send powerful signals to Google.
Furthermore, you can construct authority by seeking assistance from individuals who have already gained it in the field.
You may accomplish this by visiting resource sites or guest posting on other contractor blogs.
Tools for Link Building:
- Hunter.io helps you find relevant links to make your site authoritative.
- Ninja Outreach is one of the favorite tools for digital marketers and small businesses interested in growing their presence online.
- Buzzstream is an outreach tool and prospect manager.
Hopping onto the Social Media
Today, the internet is ruled by social media networks. To attract people’s attention, you need to be active on platforms that your consumers use and spend most of their time on.
According to Statista, by 2025, there will be a tremendous rise in social media usage.
In 2020, over 3.6 billion people were using social media worldwide, projected to increase to almost 4.41 billion in 2025.
Therefore, grabbing the audience’s attention on social media is the need of the hour for all businesses.
Expand your online presence by engaging with your audience using various features such as reels, photos, videos, stories, etc.
Platforms you can use-
- The blockchain technology is attracting interest from all over the world. It has several features that set it apart and appreciate the customer and service providers.
- Instagram is a part of the Metaverse. It’s an image-oriented platform that’s ideal for promoting your company’s image and personality to the general public. The majority of organizations and individuals are interested in contractor-focused material, as seen in this screenshot.
Twitter is a preferred platform for all businesses as it has an active user base that likes to engage with short-form content.
Optimizing On-Page SEO
When it comes to on-page SEO, the most important thing is to produce and post content on the website in such a way that it is crawlable by bots and easy for visitors.
As a result, good HTML formatting and other SEO strategies provide your users with a pleasant user experience.
Tips for On-page SEO:
- Use headings correctly, as they assist readers and search engines in tracking your material.
- When you modify or add new information to a page, the URLs, titles, and meta descriptions are automatically updated.
You can use the free Mozbar tool to check if the page passes on-page best practices; if not, optimize accordingly.
Avoid keyword stuffing.
- Make use of pillars to organize the information and make it easier for readers and crawlers to discover.
Tools To Use:
- CoSchedule is a leading tool to optimize title tags.
- On-Page Grader Tool is an efficient tool to analyze the on-page SEO.
- SEOCrawler is a trusted on-page tool that helps optimize keywords.
Increasing Page-Loading Speed
It’s critical to make sure that your site loads quickly.
After all, no one likes to stop at a site for more than 5-10 seconds in this fast-paced society.
As a result, our contractor website should load within seconds. When the site loads in one second, users are relieved of stress and have greater control over their experience.
Take a look at the following screenshot for evidence.
A website for a contractor takes 15s to load, which will irritate visitors. As a result, sites that take more than 3s to load get the least importance from users and search engines.
Tips To Decrease Page Load Time:
- Make sure you’re working on your website’s pictures; image optimization is extremely beneficial.
- Reduce your redirects to make the most of the visitor’s time.
- Eliminate unnecessary plugins that may hamper your page loading speed.
Conducting Regular Competitor Analysis
It’s not necessary to check out their site every second of the day. However, it is important to understand what works for your competitors and what doesn’t.
Fantastic competitor analysis helps you achieve all of this by examining how one business or industry succeeds and fails, as well as the mistakes that were made throughout the process.
Tips to follow while doing a competitor analysis:
- Look at their most popular keywords. Using SEO tools such as SEMrush, Ahrefs, and others that display top-ranking terms, you may discover it.
Where they end, create content. Rather than copying their material, learn from it and improve your own.
- Analyze their backlinks and establish organic ties with the individuals your competitor is linked to.
Performing a Local SEO Audit
Putting everything in place and doing nothing is like establishing a company with no way to check up on it.
This is why an SEO audit is required. SEO is a continuous and intuitive process that must be maintained regularly to determine where your site stands and what changes are necessary.
Tools for SEO Audit:
- Google Search Console Audit- See if your site is crawlable and fix any errors that would hinder indexing. Fix these issues to be crawled by search engines to appear on SERP.
Screaming Frog SEO is a fast and advanced SEO site audit tool.
- Deep crawl offers a complete end-to-end technical SEO platform with numerous tools.
- Semrush Site Audit helps fix technical issues in no time.
Local SEO for General Contractors- FAQs
Q1: How Is Local SEO Different From SEO?
Local SEO emphasizes local search queries, thus just the local traffic to your site/store.
On the other hand, SEO promotes the visibility of a website’s overall presence across various markets and regions.
Q2: What Does Local SEO For General Contractors Include?
Contractors improve their sites by using pertinent keywords for local searches to attract potential consumers by utilizing a variety of tools and studies.
Q3: How Can A Contractor Use SEO Promote Services?
3 Proven ways to promote your services:
- By improving reviews
- By running ad campaigns
- By providing valuable blog content, answer customers’ questions.
Q4: Is Local SEO Difficult?
You just have to put in place the fundamentals of SEO, and you’re ready to go. If you still have doubts about your skills, seek out any freelancer or agency with expertise in this area that you can trust.
Key Takeaways
- Use Google My Business and get your company verified on Google.
- Use tools like Google’s Search Console to optimize your content for voice search. Work on the content’s search intent.
- Manage your reviews by pinning the most glowing comments while still taking into account every negative feedback.
- Make your website responsive to increase the number of individuals who can find it and get in touch with you.
- Add a consistent location on the Map to your store for better traction.
- Leverage Advertising to grab the attention of the audience.
- Facilitate Link Building by networking with people of the same industry
- Try new Social Media trends and interact with the audience.
- Optimize On-Page SEO by taking care of minute details of the page.
- Increase page loading time by posting only the relevant things on your website.
- Conduct competitor analysis and learn from their ups and downs.
- Perform local SEO audits regularly and update the site as and when needed.