Why Start A Construction Blog in 2021
One of the long-time top contenders for the best way to optimize a website for search engines is to have a good ole fashioned blog where you share and publish useful content that your audience needs.
I hear a lot of arguments or excuses on why construction companies don’t need a blog like I don’t have time. Who will read it? Why would I give my knowledge away for free?
Are you willing to lose search engine traffic to your competitors because they have a blog and you don’t? If you are then stop reading here because the following information if used correctly is one of the best long-term strategies you can employ for your construction companies growth. Paid advertising stops the second you stop paying, social media last for hours or even minutes like on Twitter, whereas a blog post if done consistently can produce leads indefinitely.
Here are the top 5 reasons to utilize a blog for your construction company.
- Trust
A blog allows you to record your thoughts and ideas for others to learn from and lets people get to know you on a deeper level. Once people feel that connection from getting to know you they start to like you, and see things from your point of view. Once a potential customer gets to know you they start to trust you which in turn the trust carries over to your business as well.
Who do people do business with? They do business with companies they know, like, and trust.
- Backlinks
A blog is a great way to generate more traffic to your website and at the same time positioning yourself and your company as the expert on that subject. An updated blog that helps educate readers can be a resource for others to link to, which is a great backlink generation strategy. Backlinks are one of the top indicators to search engines on how popular a website is. The more backlinks you can get to your construction company’s website the higher you will rank in search results. Publishing high-quality content on your website is the number one strategy to build High-Quality Backlinks according to Alexa.com.
Pro Tip – To get backlinks it helps to make it easy to link to your articles by creating high-quality content along with HTML-ready code that other publishers can easily copy and paste to their site to link to you.
- Internal Links
A blog gives you the ability to link to other pages on your site called Internal Links. These links to other pages on your website help search engines understand what your website is all about. Having an internal linking strategy can go a long way to increase your search engine traffic on your website. Internal links help search engines understand the structure of your site, and helps search bots index and find new pages of your website. When using proper anchor text you are telling Google what your website is all about. This might be the most underutilized SEO tactic in this article, and one that can show drastic results in your SEO efforts if done well.
- Company Updates
A blog allows you to keep readers updated on your construction company. This can be a great place to talk about that national award your company won, or to announce that you will be specializing in kitchen remodels moving forward. Potential customers like to see what your company is up to and the projects you are working on. This will create and build upon your companies story, a story that you get to narrate by writing the blog. Updates can include new team members, team members of the month/week/year, a new vehicle, a new tool(s), I think you get the picture.
- Social Media Content
Blog content makes for great content for your social media channels. The first way to do this is to link directly to your blog post which is ok, but most social channels will suppress links that send users away from the social channel. There are other ways to utilize your blog for social media that produce better results than just linking.
Use short sections of your blog for a social media post can give you upwards of twenty pieces of social media content per blog post. Share a photo from your blog post with a statistic from the content. Tweet a couple of sentences from your blog, that you think have an impact. The ways to share your construction company blog on social media are unlimited. Keep trying different ways to share your post and you will discover trends to converting traffic from social media to your blog.
Now you know why your construction company blog should be a top priority, let’s cover some construction blogging tips.
Step by step how to write your blog article
Brain Dump For Construction Blog Articles
Start with a brain dump of all the information you can write about, you should aim for no less than thirty topics. Yes, you read that right you should have a list of at least thirty topics you can write helpful content that will help solve your customers’ problems, even if you don’t know everything about a subject. What this will do is give you plenty of construction blog article topics to write about, which is a great way to overcome writers block.
Here is a list of ideas to get your creative juices flowing on topics for your construction company blog.
- Keep track of common questions customers are asking you, potentially this could end up being a large percentage of your topics. Customer questions are one of the best ways to come up with article topics because if one person is asking then others have wondered the same thing.
- Think about the tools that you use and how you can give an insider's “trick of the trade” view on how to use it, proper maintenance, your purchasing recommendations, and other uses you have found. *bonus - become an affiliate and link to the product you are reviewing for your customers' ease of finding the product, and to generate a side passive income.
- DIY how-to projects that your potential customers are trying to accomplish on their own. They will turn to your page for help, and when the skill is beyond them who do you think they will hire to finish the job? DIYers are going to find the information, so you might as well be the authority on the subject, giving you authority over your competition.
- Read the construction blogs of your competitors and see what is performing well to generate your ideas(never copy someone else’s articles, that is considered plagiarism).
- Share behind-the-scenes look into your company's day-to-day activities in the office, on the road, in the field, on the job site, picking up materials, and basically anything your staff and crew is doing daily.
- Write about the bad or opposite approach to DIY a project. This is a great article topic to write after a successful how-to-style article because you have already done the research with the first subject and probably have great insight on how not to do it.
By now you should have a list of fifty to one hundred topic ideas that you can go to when you are creating content for your construction companies blog. Next, you have to figure out when to post all the great articles you are going to write.
Scheduling Construction Blog Posts
Blogging should be part of your construction marketing strategy and you should schedule your posts on a marketing calendar to get the best ROI(invested time to research and write a compelling article). Scheduling your blog posts helps guide your potential customers, and helps keep you accountable for posting to your blog. You more than likely have heard to post on a schedule like once a week, or once a month and that is great advice. Planning your posts on an actual calendar gives you a better overview of your content and the directions you want to take it, and will give you more time to write each article because you know when each one is due.
Writing a Construction Blog Headline
By this step, you have chosen a topic, decided when it’s due, and done the research so it’s time to write the headline, yes the headline. Writing a well-thought-out headline is an important step to writing a blog article, as the title is what enables potential customers to find your article, and make them want to click on it to discover more.
Here are some tips to help you write a great headline for your construction blog article:
- 25 headlines written = one great headline, write out 25 headlines to get the one you will use.
- Use numbers, odd numbers can work up to 20% better than even numbers according to the Content Marketing Institute.
- Ask questions using HOW, WHAT, WHY, and WHERE to engage the readers.
- Use power words, copyrighters have used power words to create more compelling copy and evoke emotions for decades.
Write A Captivating Intro
The amazing headline you artfully crafted in the last step got the click-through, now you have to keep the readers’ attention. A great way to capture and retain the readers’ attention is to tell a story or an industry joke, pique their interest with an interesting fact or statistic. Describing the purpose of the post and how it will fix the problem the reader is having gives them a reason to keep reading.
Outline Your Blog Post Content
Outlining can make it or break it when writing a quality construction blog post. The mark of a bad blog post is poor flow from start to finish. The post jumps around from idea to idea with no real direction. Lucky for you outlining is easy enough and will keep you on track to write a concise well thought out construction article. I recommend using a mind map to start your outline, then transfer the topics from your mind map to a logical order for your outline.
Write The Blog Post
All the hard work is done, writing the article should be the easy part. When writing your blog post you have the topics for each section from your outline, using the outline will help with writers’ block.
Using short paragraphs, concise wording, and bulleted lists will help your reader take in the information easier. Now you might be tempted to show your knowledge and use a lot of industry terms, but you should be avoiding industry jargon that your readers might not understand. Using this type of language will alienate your readers, and as a rule of thumb, you should aim for an eighth-grade reading level for your writing.
Editing Your Blog Post
There always needs to be an editing process for your writing. Here are a few tips for easy editing for your article writing.
• Print out your article – reading your writing on a printed page allows you to see things differently so you can find your spelling mistakes, and run-on sentences easier.
• Read your article out loud – this goes a step further to find any wishy-washy sentences, unnecessary words, and overuse of particular phrases.
• Use online editing tools – there is a long list of tools you can find online to edit your writing, I start my editing process with Grammarly.
• Edit after writing your first draft – avoid interruptions to your writing will help your thought flow, so save editing for the end.
Writing a blog post for your construction company may seem difficult, but just like anything the more you put in the more you get out. Writing takes practice and gets easier with time, and utilizing the information on this page will jumpstart your blog writing.
Or if you are looking for a content marketer that specializes in construction content marketing reach out for a free consultation.
