Contractor SEO

What is Contractor SEO?

The current economic recession has hit hard the highly competitive contracting industry. The market is saturated with SMB contractor businesses serving individual homeowners within limited geographic areas.

Unfortunately, the increase in interest rates forces people to postpone their home renovation plans. In such conditions, a contracting business has to find new ways to retain a stable influx of potential customers. Contractor SEO can help you attain this goal.

The contractor SEO process encompasses a number of SEO techniques. Most of them revolve around optimizing your website and pages to increase your online visibility and get more traffic.

Contractor SEO campaigns work best if they’re a part of a larger contractor marketing strategy. Many elements of this strategy can boost your SEO campaign. Learn more about digital marketing strategy for contractor business in our guide.

Custom Contractor SEO Strategy

This article provides a detailed step-by-step guide to creating and implementing contactor SEO strategies. It is written by the experts of the digital marketing agency dNOVO. The guide summarizes years of experience in providing contractor SEO services and getting our clients to the top in SERP.

The contractor SEO Strategy comprises of the following elements:

• Keyword research
• On-Page SEO
• Off-Page SEO
• Technical SEO

We’ll talk about each of the elements further in this guide.

Marketing & SEO Guides for Contactors

dNOVO Group has been providing marketing and SEO services for contractors for over a decade now. We summarised our knowledge in the series of guides. Check more guides on the topic:

• Roofing SEO
• Roofing Marketing
• Contractor Marketing
• Construction Marketing
• Construction SEO
• Landscaping Marketing
• Home Remodeling Marketing
• HVAC Marketing

Understanding How Search Engines Work

Search engines are special programs that people use to find information on the Internet. The emergence of these programs dates back to the late XX century when the Internet wasn’t omnipresent. At that time, they used very simple search engine algorithms to find relevant information online.

With the commercialization of the Internet, some webmasters began abusing the algorithms to get to the top of search results. Such shady tactics forced the developers of search engines to invent new algorithms and improve the old ones.

This arms race has impacted the web’s evolution and shaped the Internet as we know it now. Just like any competing environment it has made SEO campaigns an inalienable part of digital marketing strategy. It also made SEO a very difficult and complex process requiring the teamwork of multiple specialists.

Search Engines

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There are dozens of search engines in the world. However, their share in global searches is highly disproportionate.

According to StatCounter, Google dominates this market with a 91% market share worldwide. The individual market share of other search engines (Bing, Yandex, Yahoo, Baidu, etc.) doesn’t exceed 3%. The stats for desktop searches are slightly better with Google getting only 80%, and Bing’s share reaching 11.5%.

Still, when we talk about search engine optimization SEO, we mostly mean that we need to please Google.

How Search Rankings Work

When you look for a certain keyword, Google provides you with a list of web pages which it considers relevant to your inquiry. We call these lists Google Search Engine Results Pages (SERP).

In the screenshot above, you see the search results for “contractors near me keywords.” The most relevant webpage according to Google is at the top of this list.

Internet users seem to hold similar beliefs, as according to Backlinko’s research on Google Use, only 9% of people get to the bottom of the first SERP, and only 0.4% get to the second SERP page.

Getting to the top is hard. Google has complex algorithms to define search engine rankings that take into account multiple factors such as:

• the presence of the keyword on the web page;
• the keyword’s density (the no of times the keyword is used per 1000 words);
• the keyword presence in metadata and other strategic places;
• the UX of the web page and the website;
• the content quality;
• EEAT;
• the domain authority and page authority;
• company location.

In this guide, you will learn how to meet all these requirements and improve your search engine rankings. It will help you gain larger website traffic and more leads for your business.

Keyword Research for Contractor Website

Keyword research is the basis of a successful SEO campaign and digital marketing on the whole. It’s a process of picking the relevant keywords for your website and web pages. You will use these words and phrases in planning the content to drive organic traffic to your website.

To conduct contractor keyword research efficiently, you will need SEO tools. We recommend using SEMrush. Check out what their Keyword Overview page looks like:

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If you haven’t done keyword research before, it might seem like a collection of enigmatic data. Let’s talk about it:

Keyword Characteristics You Need to Know

There are three major characteristics you need to know for your contractor SEO strategy:

• Volume
• Difficulty
• Intent

Below is an example of an SEMrush page for a “home renovation” keyword demonstrating where each of these characteristics is located:

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Volume

Volume shows the number of times per month people are looking for a certain keyword using search engines. Think of it as the maximum number of website visitors per month you would have if your website was the only one in the organic search results.

Obviously, for many keywords that will never be the case. You will always have the competition. However, the higher search engine rankings of your web page are the more visitors you will get because the top 3 websites in the SERP get the most organic traffic.

Check out the word plumbing renovation:

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You can see that this keyword has a low volume with only 40 inquiries in search engines. You can use this keyword in your content but it’s not worth building a whole content piece around it, especially if you’re only beginning

Difficulty

Difficulty shows how hard it will be to get high keyword rankings for your page. SEMrush measures difficulty in percentages. Sometimes high-quality content will be enough to get to the top of search results. “Home repair” is such a keyword:

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However, the “home renovation” we showed at the beginning of this section has a whopping 78% difficulty, meaning you’ll need at least 126 high-quality backlinks to get to the top of SERP.

Intent

Intent indicates what people are usually up to as they are searching for a particular keyword. There are three types of intent:

• informational – people are searching for information about a certain thing.
• commercial – people are looking into different companies providing the service or selling the product.
• transactional – people are ready to make an action (book an appointment or make a purchase)

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In a sense, keyword intent matches the stages of a person’s buyer journey. Informational keywords are for the solution search stage. Commercial keywords match the contractors’ consideration stage. Transactional keywords are in the purchase stage.

You will want to interact with your potential customers at each stage of their buyer journey. That’s why we suggest picking all three types of keywords for your contractor search engine optimization.

Types of Keywords

As a rule of thumb, experienced SEO specialists use 2 categorization methods for keywords:

Long-tail vs short-tail keywords

Short-tail keywords usually consist of one keyword or a phrase (2-3 words). In many, but not all cases, they have high volume and difficulty along with commercial intent.

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The long-tail keywords consist of a sentence. Usually, they have informational intent, lower difficulty and volume. However, it’s not always the rule. What most content writers love about long-tail keywords is that you do not need to come up with the content title as you already have one readily available:

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Focus keyword and LSI keywords

To get high keyword rankings, you usually need to build a content piece dedicated to a certain keyword. For example, Toronto Garden Suites has low difficulty, high monthly volume and transactional intent:

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Here’s an example of a service page dedicated exclusively to this keyword:

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The keyword you build your content around is called the focus keyword. Google search engine usually expects to see other words and phrases related to a particular keyword. They are called LSI (latent semantic indexing) keywords.

For example, if you have the keyword “exterior home renovations Hamilton,” the Google search engine would expect you to add keywords like new windows, doors, siding, etc. Adding LSI will significantly improve your chances of getting high online search listings.

We suggest using tools that help you with LSI keywords. For example, Surfer SEO has such functionality:

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How to Conduct Keyword Research for Contractor SEO

When we talk about relevant keywords, we mean the relevance to your potential customers and to your business.

For example, “plumbing services” is a great keyword with a large volume, low difficulty and commercial intent. However, if your business does not provide this category of services, creating content around this keyword will be a waste of time. That is unless you have a partner plumbing business that refers clients to your website.

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Here’s another example. You would think that “cost of gazebo installation” is a good keyword that your potential customers are searching for online. However, its volume is zero:

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That’s why when you plan your Contractor SEO Strategies, you should include purchasing SEO tools. They make it easier for you to do extensive keyword research.

Apart from search engine optimization tools, you can look for ideas of relevant keywords in the following places:

1. Competitor websites.
2. Questions your clients frequently ask you.
3. Forums where people discuss construction and renovation projects.

On-Page SEO for Contractors

Google search engine usually analyzes not only the presence of keywords but also their density and placement. There are several rules on how to do it properly. When you write your content and stage it on your website, you must remember and apply these rules.

This process is called on-page search engine optimization and it’s an inalienable part of a successful SEO strategy.

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You must place your focus keyword in the following places:

1. In the text once per every 1000 words
2. In URL
3. In the first paragraph (first 100 words of content)
4. In the headers of first and second level.
5. In the metadata.
6. In the alt text of images.

Let’s take a closer look at some of these rules.

Headers of Web Pages

Headers of website pages play a crucial role in search engine optimization. They help break long texts into more digestible portions for better readability. They have several levels:

• First-level – one per content piece, it’s the title of the page.
• 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, and 6th level – as many as you see fit.

Crawlers pay special attention to headers since they consider that headers contain the most critical information in the content piece. That’s why, CMSs and webmasters use a special code on the web pages to mark headers.

SEO specialists use the H abbreviation followed by their level number, e.g., H1. Check out this page of a contracting business with “home renovation” keyword in H1:

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Metadata

Metadata is a special type of data created specifically for search engine crawlers. It consists of a meta title and meta description. They are usually displayed in Google search results. That’s why most specialists providing SEO services suggest limiting its size.

Usually, the meta title is similar to H1 and shouldn’t exceed 60 characters. The meta description is a short summary of your content piece. It’s limited to 160 characters.

Check out an example of our contractor SEO clients with their metadata optimized for brick repair in Hamilton:

Metadata is usually filled out either manually by a webmaster or in CMS by a content manager. Most modern CMS have either readily available functionality or special plugins to enter meta titles and meta descriptions.

Alt Text for Images

Images can boost your organic traffic and help with your website’s visibility. Previously, websites used images as space fillers that would break the text and help with readability.

Today, the general recommendation is to use images to supplement your content. As a contractor, you have multiple photos of your projects and your work process. You can use them to build trust and showcase your results.

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Once you’ve added the photos, you need to provide Google crawlers with information about it. CMS has functionality that enables you to add ALT text for image. Don’t forget to include your focus keyword when writing the alt.

Technical SEO for Contractors

Apart from keywords and content, Google crawlers analyze the user experience on your website. The search engine lowers your website rankings if it finds that your website doesn’t match its requirements.

That’s why you need to conduct a regular SEO Audit process and technical SEO. In this guide, we’ll cover the major suggestions on website improvement.

Improve Contractor SEO & UX with Website Navigation

Navigation is one of the most critical components of user experience on your website. If you have unclear navigation or pages that aren’t interlinked with other pages, your users might be lost, confused and dissatisfied.

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Here are several simple things you can do to improve it:

1. Categorize all your pages and assemble them into a simple hierarchy.
2. Interlink them respectively
3. Create navigation menu
4. Apply breadcrumb navigation
5. Use pagination for your blog.

Help Crawlers

Crawlers are robots that help search engines analyze your website. You can help them work more efficiently by:

• Creating XML Sitemap
• Indexing pages manually
• Assigning redirects

Fix Duplicate Content Issue

Duplicate content isn’t necessarily punished by search engines. However, it’s a self-disserving practice. If you have two similar pages that are both indexed in Google and fit its requirements, they begin competing with each other in the process called content cannibalization.

Sometimes, it happens between the content pieces that aren’t identical but are synonymical. Check out the screenshot below:

See how Google provides websites optimized for bathroom remodelling when you search for bathroom repair.

If you want to keep certain duplicates, you can apply canonical tags to inform crawlers which content they should consider the priority.

Increase Page Download Speed

There are several reasons why Google pay special attention to the page download speed. First, may users still have slow Internet (especially if they use mobile internet or public wifi). Second, people are not willing to wait as they expect immediate results.

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Here are the main things that impact slow-speed download:

1. Domain host.
2. Images with sizes exceeding 1 MB.
3. Videos.
4. Widgets.

That’s why we suggest running a page speed SEO audit regularly and fixing the mistakes.

Make the Contractor Website Mobile-Friendly

According to Sistrix, the number of mobile searches surpasses the number of desktop searches worldwide. Google expects your website to be mobile-friendly.

Check out an example of a website optimized for mobile:

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Off-Page SEO

Google takes into account not only the work you’ve done on your website and content but also external factors such as backlinks, local SEO, SMM, brand image, etc. We discussed social media marketing tactics in our guide to digital marketing for a contracting business. It’s a great guide for a company that aims to build its online visibility.

In this guide, we’ll be focusing on link building and local SEO for contractors.

Link building

The contractor SEO success highly depends on the links that your website pages get from other websites. High-quality backlinks can increase your page and website authority, increase the page positions in organic search results, and give you website traffic.

However, not all backlinks are considered high-quality. Links from authoritative websites in your field, industry experts and thought leaders increase your authority “in the eyes of Google.” However, links from shady businesses can be very damaging to your search rankings.

That’s why your contractor SEO process should include both link acquisition and link disavowing. Luckily, you can do it for free in the Google Search Console. All you need is a disavow file that you can either create on your own or generate with available tools online:

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Local SEO

Local SEO for contractors can help reach out to your target audience and generate more SEO leads. It doesn’t require much time or resources, and the results are usually good. This SEO tactic is best if you have a local business that operates within a limited area.

In a nutshell, Local SEO requires two creating two things:

• content around keywords with the names of cities, counties, or provinces
• Google Business Profile

Google Business Profile has several advantages:

1. It’s free for all businesses.
2. You reach out to your target audience.
3. Your business is featured in the Google Maps.
4. Your SEO rankings improve.

Contractor SEO Company

Internet marketing in general and contractor SEO in particular can be tricky to organize and implement for SMBs. Hiring and managing a team can be hard when you need to juggle so many business aspects at once. That’s why many construction companies choose to hire a contractor SEO agency.

Outsourcing digital marketing services to a Marketing & SEO agency has a number of benefits:

1. Save on your marketing budget

By hiring a SEO company you can save on salaries and tech stack. The agency will use one set of tools on multiple clients and thereby cut costs. They also have several people to fill in the same role, while a person is on vacation or if they leave.

Finally, your contracting company doesn’t have to pay managerial salaries to the person in charge of the SEO campaign.

2. Decrease the time you spend on management

One of the biggest advantages of hiring a contractor SEO agency is that they need minimal involvement from the client to work.

As an owner of a construction company, you can limit your role to SEO performance control once in a while and focus on more pressing business activities.

3. Speed up the results

A marketing & SEO company has a readily available team. You do not need to wait months to find the necessary person to fill in the role. Usually, they have several people capable of providing contractor SEO services.

Their experience will also prevent them from taking unnecessary steps. All-in-all it will be a straightforward way to online success.

4. Get decades of experience

Companies that provide contractor SEO services have years of relevant experience. They will no which SEO strategies work and which don’t.

Are you ready for more leads for your contracting business?

Book a free one-hour consultation