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Rank Your Construction Company At The Top Of Search
Like building a house you need a solid foundation for which to build your business, and that foundation is a website. Every business needs one, and for your company to grow, you will need a website that can handle growth. There is nothing wrong with building your website when you first go into business. Many great platforms make it easy to get your website up and running fairly quickly. They will have tools that help you reach the top of search engines, if optimized properly.
Websites can serve many functions in a growing construction company. A website can generate leads, give important information, educate potential customers, and help a construction company scale. In order to reap the rewards of a good website design your construction company website needs to show up at the top of search results.
A Home Builder Website will include the following to rank high in search results:
- SSL Certificate – Websites for Contractors need to be secure and that means having a Secure Sockets Layer that keeps information safe on your website. You can tell if your construction website is secure if you have HTTPS before your domain instead of the insecure HTTP. If you sell anything on your site or collect user information you will want to have a secure website. Having a valid SSL Certificate on a construction website will also help to build trust with potential customers.
- Fast Load Times – Your Home Builder Website design should load in under 2.5 seconds to improve the user experience. Google takes speed seriously and values it into how a website shows up in search results. A fast-loading website is lightweight with optimized images and minimal widgets. Website speed can be heavily influenced by the server a website is hosted with. A shared server with low bandwidth can greatly reduce your construction company website load times, and kill your chances of ranking on the first page of google.
- Mobile Responsive – Over 58% of all online traffic is on a mobile device in 2021 according to Global Stat Counter. In contrast to the barely 6% of Mobile traffic a decade earlier in 2011. Mobile responsive refers to how the layout of a website responds to different screen sizes. Will a home builder’s website design adjust atomically to the screen size is paramount to good design. At the minimum, a website should have at least three break points in screen size. Good construction website design has one design for desktop, a second design for tablets, and the third design for phones.
- Custom Design – A home builder’s website design should be custom, and not look like every other home builder website. Avoiding cookie-cutter templates and use custom design to help with branding and standing out from other home builders and contractors. Use your brand’s fonts, colors, and logo to further customize your website.
According to an https://t.co/hP0MKxtH6v study - 90.63% of all pages get zero traffic from Google, and 5.29% of them get ten visits per month or less.
— Bartholomew Media Group (@BMGagent) July 3, 2021
According to an ahrefs.com study – 90.63% of all pages get zero traffic from Google, and 5.29% of them get ten visits per month or less.
That study means you will have to do more than just choose a great design for your home builder website. You will have to do SEO on and off-page for your website to show up on the first page of Google.
SEO takes on many forms and you can find a lot of information about it, even if most of it is confusing. There are some basic SEO steps you should take to help rank your home builder website high in search results.
On-page construction website SEO
On-page SEO refers to optimizing your website on the page. This is done through code, but most page builders have the functionality to optimize your website for search.
Here are some tasks you can check off your list for on-page SEO
Write unique meta titles for each page of your construction website that is descriptive of the page. If written properly and not keyword-stuffed a search engine will use the meta title in search results. It is recommended to use 60 characters for a properly optimized meta title.
Writing a unique meta description is just as important as the meta title except you get 160 characters. This is not a place to keyword stuff, you should use well-thought-out copy that will resonate with a potential customer and get them to click on your listing. The meta description could very well be your construction company’s most important sales copy. Time spent writing and re-writing this along with the meta title will pay off in the long run more conversions in search listings.
Make it easy to contact you is an often missed opportunity with most contractor website designs. If a customer needs your service and your web page just loaded, can they see your phone number? If you are trying to get the phone to ring your phone number needs to be one of the first things a potential customer sees. Not only do you have to have your phone number listed clearly but have it big and bold so no one can miss it. Another good practice is to make the phone number clickable making it even easier to reach out to your construction company.
Have a sitemap that outlines the structure of your website to help get the pages of your website indexed. Most website builders will create a simple sitemap that is more than suitable for search engines. Don’t put a lot of time here, just make sure you have one and that it is correct.
Have an easy navigation structure so your customers can move around your site with ease and find the information they are looking for. Using an internal linking structure on your website is a great strategy that helps search engines determine what your website is about. Coming up with a navigation structure for your website should happen early in the design process for best results.
Fill in Alt Text for every image on your home builder website. Alt Text is alternative text, also referred to as “alt tags”, it is the description you can enter for images on your website. This practice helps with website accessibility for people that use screen readers, it helps them to understand what the image is about. This will also let search engines know what the image is about, so it’s a good idea to clearly describe the image with similar keywords from your page.
Use a favicon to look more professional all while giving your brand a boost. A favicon will show up in browser tabs, bookmarks, and history which makes it easier to find if it’s branded. Easier to use makes for a better user experience and that is the goal is to make the customer stick around.
Off-Page Construction Website SEO
After everything is optimized on your website you have to start building your off-page link profile through many channels and networks. This is the secret ingredient to ranking higher in search results, even the coveted #1 position on Google. It does take work and time for your website to rank at the top of search results, but this is worth every penny and hour you invest in off-page SEO.
Backlinks are king when it comes to ranking higher in search results and with the proper tools, you can make a lot of headway in this area. One method is to make sure you are listed in the proper directories and the directory has the correct information about your construction company. Listed in directories is not the end-all solution, but just the beginning of building high-quality backlinks to your website.
Here is a list of some backlink strategies you can utilize for your construction company.
- Guest posting is when you write an authoritative article for another website to get a link pointing back at your website.
- Article posting is when you write an article to post on an article-based website. This was a popular technique that can still help with website authority.
- Blog commenting will normally carry a no-follow link which tells search engines to not follow this link. A no-follow link is still important if the blog is in your industry and you provide a valuable comment that drives the conversation. A no-follow link only stops search engines, not humans. That’s where the value is with no-follow blog comment links is potential customers can click on it and visit your website.
- Industry awards can carry a lot of weight to build your authority especially if they come with a backlink to your website. This is a great strategy to start and see how many awards your company can win. Imagine the badges you can post to your awards won page of your website.
- Broken links is an oldie but a goodie when it comes to backlink strategies. If you run across a website that is no longer online, any website or link that points to that website is a broken link. A broken link is a link that points nowhere. Once you find a broken site, do a search and find the other websites that have that broken link and contact them with notice of the bad link and a suggestion of a good link to replace it(ie your website). This is referred to as the Moving Man Method.
- Become the expert in your industry for reporters and journalists. You can go to sites like HARO and offer up your expertise to reporters and bloggers, and this can lead to some very authoritative backlinks from news sites.
- Social media business pages can provide your website with more authority. Having these important business pages helps by giving search engines more information about your brand, like how popular it is.
- Write skyscraper content for your website. Writing authoritative long form content can generate backlinks, if your article is better than the rest. Do a Google search for the keywords you are thinking about writing content about and read the first three results. All you have to do is write content that is better than what is showing up on the top of search results.
A backlink strategy for your construction company takes time and is considered the long game when it comes to construction marketing. The best part of having a good backlink profile is that it will continue to pay dividends long after you are done working on it. The effects will last for years for all of your efforts to get your construction website to the top of search results, unlike Paid Ads that stop working the second you stop paying.
If you are looking for an expert to help you with SEO and building backlinks for your construction company reach out for a free consultation. With the consultation, you will get a site health report along with a backlink report for your construction website. Reach out today!
