SEO for contractors is one of the most promising marketing tools available. Properly executed contractor marketing services are a great way to increase organic web traffic and increase web conversions. This will improve profits and create a steady stream of dependable revenue in the long term.
However, SEO for contractors is not an overnight miracle. It is a long-term process that begins to show tangible results in the first four to six months but, when appropriately executed, continues to grow and build for years to come. In short, you cannot reasonably expect to hire a contractor marketing SEO professional and see results in just a few weeks.
Building the campaign and then maintaining the SEO campaign is essential regardless of your company's industry. However, a well-run campaign has the potential to boost profits, continue to pay off, and improve company visibility, all for a minimal cost compared to traditional marketing campaigns.
With that in mind, it is time to explore contractor marketing in more detail. This guide will break down everything you need to know about contractor marketing. Plus, a few things that you may not need to know if you hire contractor marketing services, but cement the importance of leaving SEO to a professional SEO contractor.
Chapter 1
To start, it is essential to understand what contractor SEO involves. A contractor is typically defined as an independent party that performs work for a client. Therefore, contractor SEO involves an independent SEO professional who is tasked with the job of optimizing a website.
Web contractors and marketing contractors who are hired to boost a company's web presence have to be trained and knowledgeable of SEO because it is the strongest online marketing tool.
While any trade can benefit from contractor SEO, common customers include electricians, plumbers, HVAC technicians, landscapers, roofers, and more. Let's take a closer look at why SEO matters when it comes to contractor marketing services.
Contractor marketing services aim to improve a company's online or offline presence and boost its sales. Marketing contractors create clever marketing campaigns that lead consumers to the company. The ultimate goal then becomes to convert the leads created by the marketing campaign.
For contractor marketing companies that focus on raising a company's profile online, this means boosting their SEO value. Search engine rankings matter the most because they create the highest conversion rates. SEO for contractors is vital for marketers who want to see their conversion rates spike.
Traditional marketing methods have an associated lead closure rate of 1.7%. That is a lot of work for just under 2% of successful lead conversions. However, correctly executed SEO campaigns boost lead conversion to a stunning 14.6% close rate.
Why? Because SEO captures an audience that is already interested and ready to buy. The only thing left is to make sure that these buyers find your website, company, or product. Effective contractor marketing SEO makes that happen.
A market contractor independently enters a contract with another company to handle their marketing campaign. They do not have to answer to any other entity and are therefore not employees of any other company. Service contractor marketing involves the independent party securing a contract with a company of their own accord.
Marketing contracting online involves a lot of SEO work, usually since this is the only way to improve a business's online presence sustainably. Therefore, a proper understanding of SERPs and how to obtain high rankings via white hat SEO is extremely important to contractor marketing SEO practices.
Marketing contracting online involves a lot of SEO work, usually since this is the only way to improve a business's online presence sustainably. Therefore, a proper understanding of SERPs and how to obtain high rankings via white hat SEO is extremely important to contractor marketing SEO practices.
In today's world when people need a contractor they do not go turn to the yellow pages, they open up their mobile phone and run a quick search. Most customers will choose one of the top three search results, which is why your company needs to be at the top. The best way to rise up the search engine rankings page (SERP), is via effective SEO for contractors.
As just discussed, contractor SEO services are one of the easiest ways to boost lead conversion rates, and high conversion rates lead to pleased customers. This is just one of the benefits of SEO for contractors.
The first benefit for businesses who hire contractor SEO services is a jump in their search engine ranking. This benefit is clear from the start as a higher search engine ranking leads to increased web traffic. However, this is not the only benefit.
Other benefits of choosing to use a contractor SEO include:
Contractor marketing does not have to be complicated if you hire the right marketing contracting company to represent your trade. Consumers who need help from various contractors are most likely o head online these days. By positioning yourself as an industry authority, you will easily win their business.
Becoming an industry authority in the modern world is about landing at the top of the search results and in paid SEM advertisements. The more consumers see your name, the more they assume you are an industry leader within their market.
Skilled contractor marketing services can help that happen by boosting your website to the top of the SERPs. In addition, name retention is the number one way to get a cold call for emergency services because customers in a panic will call the first company that comes to mind, and with the right SEO marketing contractor services - yours will be it.
Now that you understand why it is important to hire a general contractor SEO expert, it may be intriguing to learn some of the SEO strategies you should expect from them. While your website will not jump to the top of the search engine rankings overnight, it will gradually climb the rankings with the help of the right SEO-based web content marketing team.
The pace at which your SEO improves and the level that your website can reach on the SERPs is heavily dependent on the SEO strategies that your content marketing employs. Here are a few methods that you should expect your team to execute.
Chapter 2
The average user only spends ten seconds on a website before moving on. When someone clicks on your website and then leaves, they are known as a bounce, and you want to keep your bounce rate down to improve conversions.
Every single bounce is a potential customer that you have lost. A straightforward way to improve your bounce rate and encourage browsers to contact your company is by creating a user-friendly website, which can be done if you hire the right team to help with web marketing for contractors.
A user-friendly website is visually appealing and easy to navigate. People expect websites to be optimized and quick to navigate these days because they can click away and find a better option.
Think about a physical store; which do you think will be more successful? One that is shadowy, dusty, cluttered, and decorated with the sense of someone who lived in the seventies, or one that is bright, organized, and making full use of trendy, modern decor?
The answer is clear, and the answer is the same in the digital world. These days a website's appearance determines its value, so make sure to choose a general contractor SEO who can deliver the results you are after.
Fortunately, creating a mobile-friendly website is not out of reach if you work with the right web marketing for contractors. Even minor adjustments such as optimizing how your website loads on mobile platforms and removing flash will go a long way to increase overall user-friendliness.
Light images, reduced content, large fonts, and removal of pop-ups are all great additional features that will make your website more friendly while it loads. In addition, these changes will help your website load faster, and load rate plays a significant role in whether a customer sticks around or not.
Another great way to boost your website profile online and overall search engine optimization is by producing consistent content. Consistent content is crafted carefully to match the tone of your organization and provide authority and SEO opportunities for your website.
Content marketing for contractors is one of the easiest and most logical ways to obtain new customers. It simply involves using what you already know to create compelling content marketing for contractors' campaigns. It involves creating a blog or content on a website that offers customers valuable information.
This is generally instructional blogs or helpful hints about household systems such as plumbing or electricity for contractors. While it may seem counterproductive, giving away bits of information actually helps prove your credibility. When a big task comes along, your company will be the most familiar name on their tongue.
Content for a contractor-based website is best to address common questions related to your trade to attract interest and gain exposure. For example, if you are a plumber, your target audience is likely online looking for topics like "how do I unclog a drain in…."
You will get their attention if you optimize blog pages that offer solutions to each of their problems, or at the very least address the problem and explain why your contractor services are necessary. For example, a plumber may say you can try flushing hot water down a drain, but it is better to call them for professional aid to avoid a larger issue if that doesn't work.
The trick to content marketing for contractors is to offer customers something useful while also adding a CTA highlighting the benefits of working with your company. This power combo is a great way to boost your website SEO and conversion rate.
When most people think about what happens on their websites, they concentrate on optimizing their web pages, but what happens off your website counts as well. Known as offsite SEO, there are dozens of off-page SEO techniques that can help you boost your website's profile.
Offsite SEO for contractors is extremely important if you want to raise the search engine rankings and help establish your authority in the region. Things like directories, local review websites, and similar listings are great examples of basic SEO for contractors that you need to pay attention to.
Off-page SEO can be as simple as a brand mention on a fellow contractor's website to a significant social media presence in online groups. There are dozens of off page techniques to help raise your profile, and each and every single one of them is designed to help boost your off page SEO value.
Some of the most common off-page SEO techniques include:
Search engines use off-page SEO to determine how much value you add to your industry on local and national levels. Websites frequently mentioned in other off-page locations are considered authorities and noted sources of information.
In return, Google (and other prominent search engines) will boost your profile and increase your search ranking. While it seems counterproductive to be popular online, you need to be popular online; it is a simple truth of the off-page SEO world.
However, the good news is that an effective team of marketers who are used to performing offsite SEO for contractors can help you create the web presence you need for high search engine rankings. When executed carefully, each off-page SEO campaign will naturally lead to more company recognition and, therefore, a higher ranking.
Offsite SEO for contractors is extremely important if you want to raise the search engine rankings and help establish your authority in the region. Things like directories, local review websites, and similar listings are great examples of basic SEO for contractors that you need to pay attention to.
Contractors are not concerned with national rankings or even national attention. Their audience is strictly local, so local SEO for contractors is extremely important. This is actually a benefit of being a local company because optimizing a website for local rankings versus national rankings is much easier.
However, there are still a series of intricate hoops that local contractors need to jump through and many boxes to check to obtain a high local SEO ranking. For this reason, it is best to rely on a trained SEO team to handle your local SEO for contractors. Here are just a few of the many tasks that your SEO team will take to ensure accurate optimization.
Chapter 3
If you are a small contractor looking for the best way to optimize your business, then local SEO for contractors is the solution. As mentioned earlier, SEO offers a more significant ROI compared to traditional print or televised marketing efforts and is the best way to increase your web conversion rates.
The reason for this is simple; your target audience is already online looking for you. The instant something goes wrong with a home, the first thing a homeowner likely does is grab their phone or tablet and search for "plumber near me," electrician near me," etc. You want to be the first contractor to pop up on their phone because, in an emergency, they won't have time to sift through the results.
With the correct local SEO for contractors, you will be the first contractor to pop up on the phone, and with a little more luck, you will be the featured blurb at the top of the SERP. This will earn you a much higher click-through rate, which will lead to more successful leads.
The very best way to instantly see tangible results from your local SEO efforts is with a Google My Business listing. People who need a contractor don't often have a lot of time, so they immediately look to the right for available information about the results they are viewing. If your Contractor GMB is on point, they will see your business and click call or contact from the handy button creating an instant client.
Even consumers who are not in a rush will often instantly shift their eyes to the right of the Google results screen out of habit, and you want their first impression to be good. A poorly filled out Google My Business listing reflects poorly on your business and will likely lead clients to keep browsing. These days an adequately filled out contractor GMB is synonymous with authority and credibility, so you cannot afford to let yours slip.
At this point, it should go without saying that your local SEO is the most important part of any marketing effort you could employ online. You don't need to appeal to clients across the states, but you need to appeal to clients in your hometown who are available leads. Therefore, your local SEO for contractor websites is irreplaceable.
So how do you make that happen? Here are a few tips that can help boost your local SEO efforts. Local search engine optimization is attainable for any contractor business with the proper knowledge and professionals by your side.
One of the reasons local SEO is challenging is that it is the most fluid of all types of local search engine optimization. Unlike other SEO tactics that are reliable, the perimeters for local SEO rankings seem to change often.
As you might guess, that can make local SEO for contractor websites complex but certainly not unobtainable. Your goals are also different for local SEO versus traditional website optimization. While you want a high search ranking on the results page, you also want your GMB listing to be prominently displayed and appear in the local pack listings.
So how does that happen? Via various local SEO tactics, a few of which are included below. This is just the tip of the iceberg, but it is a good springboard for anyone looking to jump into local SEO for a contractor website.
So what is the best way to boost your local search engine optimization? As discussed earlier, optimally, you combine the complete list of options above to create a solid local SEO campaign. Still, if you need to provide an instant boost to your local SEO efforts, Google My Business is it.
Your Google My Business entry needs to be properly optimized and checked twice for accuracy. Website address, contact, phone number, email, and physical address need to be correct, or you risk losing potential customers.
In addition, you can make your GMB listing and, therefore, local search engine optimization efforts more appealing to browsers by encouraging happy customers to leave reviews. A high amount of positive reviews is one of the best ways to obtain credibility for your business instantly.
If you are a contractor, then you already know that there is always going to be "that customer." The one who is unhappy regardless of what you do, who believes that trade services are overpriced, and who is intended to be unsatisfied with the job results. In the real world, that customer isn't of much consequence, but in the virtual world, that customer can do a lot of damage in a short amount of time.
With that in mind, online reputation management for contractors is essential for retaining your SEO results. 86% of people read local business reviews, so you must carefully monitor reviews and continually encourage happy customers to leave reviews that counter that one bad sport.
While you can hire a campaign to handle your online reputation management for contractors, the best way to manage your online reputation is to earn more positive reviews and adequately handle any negative reviews for contractors. Limiting reviews or deleting reviews is not the answer, as this can be viewed as censorship or hiding the truth, but you can respond to them.
Most rating sites such as Yelp, Google, and Facebook allow businesses to respond to negative reviews. What you say here can make a lot more difference than what the bad reviewer says. Always stay polite when you respond to contractors' negative reviews, and offer to remedy the problem depending on the situation. Many reviewers will go back and update their reviews if you can help solve their dilemma.
Technical SEO is a broad term that describes all of the optimization tasks that happen within the infrastructure of your website to help boost your website's SEO friendliness. The main goal of technical SEO is to ensure search engines can easily crawl and index it, which can be accomplished via website speed optimization, mobile optimization, and a streamlined XML sitemap.
Everything from the time it takes for the page to load to duplicate content to schema markup services can affect how your website performs on the SERPs. With this in mind, technical SEO for contractors is essential. Here are a few key things you need to zero in on to boost your contractors' website SEO value.
Chapter 4
One of the most important things you can do for your website to improve its bounce rate reduces your page load speed. The optimal speed page load time is 4 seconds which is about the time it takes to blink your eyes. If it takes longer for your website to load, searchers will actually move to the following website link.
In fact, 25% of all visitors will choose to move onto another website if it doesn't load within three to four seconds, which means your slow page load speed could be costing you a large portion of potential clients. The good news is that you can fix the time it takes for the page to load simply by beefing up your technical SEO for contractors.
Given the importance of page load speed, at this point, you should be considering how to increase the website speed of your contractor website. Walmart learned that reducing their page load speed by one second earned them billions more per year. While you may not have the client base to expect that type of reward, proper technical SEO will give you a relatively prosperous reward.
There are several ways to improve page load speed, but most of them are complex and require some coding tricks that may be well above your pay level. This is why the best way to approach website optimization is with the help of a professional SEO company.
However, if you are ready to start working on page load speed now, there are a few tricks you can start to tackle. One great place to start is with image optimization by reducing file sizes or removing bulky images. Another is to consider CSS coding, which reduces the need to reduce files since it is easier to download from most hosting services.
If you are starting to get a little lost at this point, then the right choice will be a technical SEO content company with experience working with contractors. They can help look over your entire website architecture and tighten things up so that your website responds appropriately.
Mobile traffic accounts for over 50% of all web traffic in the modern world, and that number will likely continue to grow over the next decade. It is not crazy to theorize that in the future, desktop web access will start to become obsolete outside of specific industries in the same way that laptops have replaced desktop models.
As potential customers increasingly rely on their mobile devices for information, you will need a great mobile page load speed to earn their clicks. Users of mobile devices will click onto another website even faster than desktop users, which means your website needs to be optimized to continue attracting new customers.
As already discussed, the market is slowly shifting towards mobile internet access, and with it comes a renewed call for high page load speeds and optimized mobile content. It doesn't matter if your website is the first search for local contractors if it won't load on a customer's phone.
These days most people do searches on their smartphones. If they have a question or a need, they turn to the device closest to them, which nine out of ten times will likely be their phone. A customer is most likely to initiate contact with a contractor while they are in the middle of an emergency.
That same customer will not wait for a page to load or mess around with a page that is not optimized correctly and is hard to navigate. They will choose your competitor instead. Boost your mobile page load speed, and you not only get those customers back, but you can steal customers from competitors who are not modernizing their websites.
Backlinks are somewhat similar to a population contest in the world of search engine optimization. Google ranks websites with more backlinks as more popular than others. It is inclined to show results of websites that it already deems popular and valuable, so you want to earn a spot in the popular crowd of local contractors.
Duplicate content can pop up quickly on a website manufactured to hit SEO landmarks. While general keywords are important, rewriting the same content can hurt your technical SEO for contractors. This is just one of the many ways that duplicate content can hurt you, but the bottom line is you need to resolve them if you want to rise to the top of the SERPs.
Duplicate content is exactly what it sounds like: content that is precisely the same in various domains or close enough that it appears to be a duplication. This tends to occur more frequently on actual website pages, but meta descriptions and meta titles can also turn into duplicate content.
There are two ways to approach duplicate content, hire a technical SEO for contractors to help you find duplicate content and fix it or purchase access to a duplicate content finder. The best solution is usually a combination of both solutions.
If your contractor website does not have an XML sitemap, you are missing out on an integral technical SEO opportunity. The XML sitemap is structured to serve up a complete list of a website's most essential pages to Google on a silver platter. This ensures that search engines see everything you want them to.
If you don't have an XML sitemap, then it is time to learn how to create a sitemap or hire something with the technical knowledge to do so for you. You first need to crawl your website to obtain a complete list of pages and then denote which pages are valuable enough to include. At the same time, you need to exclude pages that might be hindering your SEO value.
You also will need to select the priority of how URLs are displayed and choose images among other tasks to create a complete XML sitemap. Don't worry if this sounds like Greek to you, there are dozens of sitemap XML examples you can easily find online, or you can hire an SEO contractor to handle the task.
Your structured data markup is your chance to tell Google how to categorize your business among service results. However, this can be tricky for contractors since Google excludes home services. Instead, Google relies on schema makeup for services to sort what service is being offered to what area by what business.
This means that structured data markup is an essential component of your website. Missing information in your web services schema can result in missed opportunities, and all missed opportunities mean missed profit.
The most effective way to add structured data to your website is via schema markup for services. Your scheme makeup needs to hit several key data points, including local business, business name, region served, and type of service. Failing to define your schema properly can reduce your appearance in relevant Google searches.
The best way to approach a web services schema is by stepping back to identify the organic keywords you need to use. Several factors need to be defined before you can integrate your schema markup into your website, including:
Whether you refer to them as incoming links, one-way links, inbound links, or backlinks, they are essential in shaping the SEO value of your website. In fact, backlinks are one of the most reliable measures of a website's SEO performance, which means it pays to pay attention to the backlinks that direct traffic to your website.
Chapter 5
At this point, you probably want to know precisely what are backlinks? The answer is straightforward. Backlinks are any time another website links to your website.
If another website refers to your company and then links to your website, you will have earned a backlink. One backlink is excellent; a few hundred is practically a guaranteed strong SEO performance for a local contractor.
Backlinks are somewhat similar to a population contest in the world of search engine optimization. Google ranks websites with more backlinks as more popular than others. It is inclined to show results of websites that it already deems popular and valuable, so you want to earn a spot in the popular crowd of local contractors.
You can't just go around the internet looking for websites that are willing to post your link. There are backlinks best practices because there are solid and harmful backlink opportunities like most things in the SEO world. The key is knowing how to generate backlinks and finding mutually beneficial websites to trade links with.
When hiring an SEO company to build high PR backlinks, the adage "you get what you pay for" is very true. Effective PR backlink campaigns rely on social networking and relationships with influencers, bloggers, and other high-traffic magazines and websites.
Therefore, one of the top backlinks best practices is to invest in a professional with a reputation that precedes them. Backlinks are a large part of Google search algorithms, and the investment you make will influence the profit you later make when your SERP ranking rises (or doesn't).
One of the most complex parts of link building is that you can only create outbound links. You cannot directly tell other websites to add your link to their content, which is why effective backlink-building strategies can be complex.
However, complicated does not mean impossible. While it may take more work to craft effective backlink building services, your work will pay off. Several high-authority links are worth much more than dozens of low-quality backlinks.
Before approaching link-building strategies, take a minute to acknowledge that unethical strategies will get your contracting website blacklisted. Therefore, if something sounds shady or too good to be true, it is a good idea to avoid it.
For instance, you never want to buy backlinks or scatter your backlinks around spam websites or other websites that Google will consider low quality. You are who you link with online, so if your backlinks are overwhelmingly from spam websites, Google will assume your website is also spammy.
On the other hand, effective link-building strategies focus on developing backlinks with websites that are high authority. This can take longer, but it is the crowd that you want Google to associate you with. Remember the earlier example of the popular kids?
It will pay to make friends with at least one or two high-quality websites so you can exchange links. Even better, produce high-quality content that can be shared or posted and create natural opportunities for solid backlinks.
It can be more challenging for a small contractor to find reputable high-authority websites to link with because they are outside of your grasp. A small lawn care business cannot reasonably expect to earn a backlink mention from Scott's, but they can get listed on local association websites.
The best way to generate backlinks as a local contractor is to build backlinks to local SEO landing pages. Local associations are happy to welcome more businesses into their listings and directories, and you gain a valuable backlink each time in exchange. Some great ways to obtain local SEO backlinks for contractors include:
Guest posts are an easy way to create natural and organic opportunities for backlinks. Not only do they help establish your company as a local authority, but it is natural to insert links into the writer's biography, creating the perfect organic backlink.
There are two ways to approach guest post opportunities: writing on others' websites and inviting other local experts to write on yours. It can sometimes be easier to submit a guest post to blogging websites or related blogging websites, but guest post opportunities for contractors abound.
DIY culture is enormous these days, so reframing a blog to address a DIY issue with a solution that refers customers back to your business for further help is a very effective guest post opportunity. Local news sites, local associations, and community organizations with social media profiles all pose excellent guest post opportunities for contractors.
As the name implies, local business directories exist to list local businesses' locations, phone numbers, emails, and websites. They are natural places for backlinks to exist and are a great asset to any backlink campaign.
Google is your oyster when it comes to finding business directories for contractors. Local business directories can be highly focused, such as a free directory for BIPOC owned businesses in Bradenton, FL, or extremely large such as Google My Business.
If your business is aligned with a local business directory, you should submit your information. However, to make the most out of local business directories, make sure you have a business classification, official name, business address, and local phone number. Yahoo! Local, Foursquare, City-Data, Superpages, and Angi are great places to start.
CHAPTER 6
We hope that this guide helps your contractor business propel up the search rankings on Google. We invite you to contact us to share your feedback and experiences after working through this guide.
If you would rather hire someone to help you with your contractor SEO, we would be pleased to partner with you and allow you to take advantage of our team of experienced internet marketing professionals that cares as much about your success as you do!
Are you ready to get started or do have questions about your online marketing options? We are happy to talk with you either way.
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