SEO for construction companies

How to climb the google rankings and stand out in a crowded marketplace

While the average construction company is a dab hand when it comes to all things brick and mortar, a solid SEO strategy is typically not in their wheelhouse. As we wrote about recently in our complete guide to digital marketing for construction companies, a well thought out marketing strategy can net you a wider audience, better clients and more revenue. As far as marketing strategies go, SEO should be up there as one of your digital priorities.

In this blog, we’re going to give you a breakdown of everything you need to know about SEO for construction companies. From website SEO through to SEO optimised articles and blogs, we’ll give you all the tools you need to get to the top of search engine results pages.

Why is SEO important?

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last 20 years, you’ll have a loose idea of what SEO is. At a basic level, it’s simply the work you do on your website that will increase your chances of appearing high up the search engines for particular search terms. But why is it important?

The days of the yellow pages are over; the world has turned digital. In the construction industry, word of mouth and relationships are still as relevant as ever, but you’ll be missing out on a lucrative stream of client leads if you don’t get your SEO ducks in order. By putting together a solid SEO strategy, you’re developing a resource that will continually put your name and exploits in front of a new client base.

In the digital world, your website does a lot of heavy lifting. Recent research shows that 64% of all web traffic comes from organic search rather than direct website visits, putting a heavy emphasis on the importance of SEO and its power to bring people to your website from the search engines.

The higher you get up the search engines results page the more clicks you’ll get. Approximately 33% of all clicks will go to the website in the number one position, with the other clicks being shared out by those below it. The further you go down the page, the smaller the piece of the pie you’ll get until there’s no pie left at all.

Put your reader first and nearly everything else will follow

SEO is one of those topics where you can give yourself a boost with all kinds of tips and tricks. Before we get into all that, it’s important to understand that none of it will matter if your content and web copy is poor. The number one thing you should work towards before touching the more technical stuff, is high quality, value-adding content that puts your reader’s needs first.

When your content is useful for readers and when it sufficiently answers their search intent, Google will know. It’s at that point Google will start to rank your page higher and put you on track to top the results page.

But what does high-quality content entail? Well, there many things that go into making a piece of quality content. The most important are:

• Being useful and informative: If you can provide answers to your reader’s questions, half the battle is won.

• Being specific and comprehensive: That means content that covers a topic in detail, getting into the nuts and bolts and telling your audience all they need to know

• Offering unique information: Try not to regurgitate information that’s already out there. If you can produce unique content, it’ll be something your reader can’t get elsewhere, giving you an edge over the competition. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel, simply finding a new way to present information can be all the novelty you need (such as a step by step guide or an infographic).

• Engaging your reader: If you can write with verve and persuasion, this will have a direct effect on the quality of your content. Good writing makes things a joy to read, boring writing makes things a chore, and bad writing makes things messy and unclear. If you can get into that ‘good’ category, you’ll have your readers and Google eating out of your palm.

Keywords and how to research them

SEO for construction companies is much the same as for any other industry. The tactics don’t change, it’s only the specifics that are different. One of those specifics is the keywords you use. Selecting the right ones are pivotal to getting a steady stream of organic traffic coming to your website from the search engines.

A keyword is essentially a word or a small phrase that forms the topical backbone of your web page or web content.

For your website, you’ll be looking to target keywords that pertain to your product or service; something like ‘residential construction company’. For blogs and articles, you’ll pick keywords that are relevant to the questions your target audience might type into Google. As an example, let's imagine your keyword is, ‘Changes to planning regulations’. You could craft a piece of content about those changes. Something like:

‘How will the changes to planning regulations affect my development?’

Keyword research

All good SEO practice requires keyword research to get the right results. But how do you do that? There are many keyword tools available, like Moz and Ubersuggest that allow you to find the perfect keyword. These platforms allow you to find a keyword’s

• Search volume
  and

• SEO Difficulty

Search volume is how many monthly searches that term gets and SEO difficulty is how hard it will be to rank for that particular search term. Essentially, you want to find a search term with as high a search volume and as low a difficulty as possible. This can be tricky, most of the high-volume search terms come with a high search difficulty precisely because everyone is trying to rank for high volume terms.

This is why the highest search volume terms aren’t always the best candidate. Often, it's better to go for a lower volume term that’s less competitive, giving you a much better chance of ranking.

Satisfying search intent

Another thing to consider is search intent. Many generic terms have a very high search volume. If you look at search metrics for the term ‘construction’, you’ll see that the search volume is very high.

Seems like a great keyword to go for, right? Think again. Not only is the SEO difficulty very high for this term, but the search intent is all wrong. As a construction company, you want the traffic coming from the search engines to be qualified. More simply, you want those visitors to be on the hunt for construction services.

The problem with the term ‘construction’ is that it's incredibly broad. The top ten results for the term feature only one construction company, the rest of the list is made up of construction news outlets, encyclopedia entries, and accrediting bodies.  

Longtail keywords

To get more qualified leads coming to your website organically, you’ll need to be more fine-grained with your approach. You can do this by targeting longtail keywords. All this means is you make your keywords a bit longer and a bit more specific.

By changing the search term to ‘Construction companies in Manchester’, we get a lower search volume, but those searches will be much more qualified. Also, by adding some more specifics, we bring the SEO difficulty down by over half.

What about the search intent? As you can see from the list below, the vast majority are construction companies.

When it comes to long-tail keywords, there are many avenues you can go down. In the above example, we’ve decided to target a location focussed longtail keyword, but it could just as easily be a specialism focus (such as residential or commercial).

The difference between SEO for web copy and SEO for Web content

For virtually every piece of writing on your website, there should be some SEO considerations behind it. However, there are subtle differences you’ll need to take into consideration for different kinds of content.

Your website homepage

Many elements go into writing great copy for a website. We cover many of those elements in our complete guide to digital marketing for construction companies. From an SEO perspective, you should be peppering a few keywords through your homepage and other auxiliary pages to capture some organic traffic. Those keywords will depend on your business.

As an example, if you’re a Manchester construction company specialising in regeneration projects, you might pick a few keywords to put on your home page. One obvious candidate would be, ‘Manchester construction company’ while ‘Regeneration projects’ would satisfy your specialism. With this in mind, some of your homepage web copy might read as follows:

‘XYZ Construction are a Manchester-based construction company specialising in regeneration projects.’

Your bank of SEO optimised content

Newsflash, this article is a piece of SEO optimised content, designed to attract organic traffic for a specific search term. Having a bank of content is a long-term strategy that’s geared towards engaging with your target market and getting your name in front of them. To be effective with it, you’ll need to understand the questions your target audience want answers to. If you can decipher the questions on their mind, you can craft content aimed at answering those questions.

As an example, a small developer might have a question about planning for a regeneration project. Once you establish this as a question your target market frequently ask, you can craft a blog/article on the subject. Such a piece of content might be titled,

‘Everything you need to know about planning for regeneration projects’

In this example, the keyword you’re targeting is ‘Planning for regeneration projects’.

Unlike the web copy for your website proper, SEO optimised content is in-depth and substantial. Where your homepage might have 250-400 words on it, an SEO optimised piece of content can clock in at anything from 1500 to 3000 words.

Where to put your keywords

Once you’ve established what your keywords are, it's time to start peppering them through your copy and content. However, where you place your keywords can have a direct effect on how successful you are at climbing the rankings.

Page title

Whether it's your home page or a blog, putting your keyword in the title is important for SEO. If your website is built via a template supplier like Squarespace, this is very easy to do. Simply select Heading 1 as the text size for the snippet of text with your keyword in it. If your site is built from scratch, you’ll need to go into the HTML of the page and wrap the appropriate piece of text in an H1 tag.

You might not always be able to put your keyword in the page title. This is particularly true of things like your services page, where your page title is going to be fairly self-explanatory. In these instances, you can use Heading 2 text or an H2 tag for your keyword in the form of a subheading instead of a page title.

Page URL

Putting your keyword in the URL of a page is another easy way to get a small SEO boost. This is great for SEO optimised content like blogs and articles, but not particularly viable for your regular website pages.

Here’s an example from our last blog:

Title tag/Meta tags

The title or metatag of a page is the clickable link that will appear in the google search results. Most website hosting/building platforms will allow you to easily edit the title tag (or metatag as some call it). Again, if you built your website from scratch, you’ll need to go into the HTML to edit it. The title tag is arguably one of the most important places to put your keyword, as it both influences your clickthrough rate (an important metric for improving your SEO) and directly improves your SEO ranking by helping the search engines understand your content.

Here’s an example of an SEO optimised title tag:

Meta descriptions

Meta descriptions are nice to add if you have time. They’re a short extract Google displays below the link to your page in the search results. However, Google won’t always use it. Sometimes, it’ll just pull information from the article itself. There’s no scientific way to know whether it will use your meta description or pull information from the article, so you’re only writing the meta description on the off chance it could be used.

The meta description itself doesn’t have a direct effect on SEO rankings, but it can give your reader an idea of the page's contents, hence improving your click-through rate and improving your SEO indirectly.

Keyword density

When it comes to your actual copy and content, you might think you’d be better off cramming as many instances of your keyword into your content as possible. Let me settle it here and now: Keyword cramming does NOT work. It’ll make your writing seem unnatural and Google will rightly see it as a cynical attempt to game the algorithm.

You should use your keyword/keywords a few times but only where it comes across naturally. As a rough guide, in a long-form blog post (2000 words and over) I tend to use a keyword 5 or 6 times. With much shorter bits of copy like your homepage or your services page, you’ll probably only use your keyword once. It's really about keeping it natural and fitting it in with moderation.

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So there you have it - a crash course on SEO for construction companies. Putting time and effort into your SEO is a cost-effective investment that will pay dividends over time. Once an article is written and starts doing well on the search engines, it’ll consistently bring you new leads without much effort from you. You might need to occasionally update your blogs and web pages if new information becomes available, but this work is minimal in comparison to the benefit that comes from well-curated content and top-quality web copy.

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If you’re looking for an agency to help you climb the search engines, give Luma a call and we’ll set you on your way to SEO success.