Contractor SEO - Tips and Tricks To Grow Your Business

Why does SEO matter?

Most people don’t look past the first page results as most clicks go to the highest-ranked websites. Needless to say, if your local ranking is unfavorable, you might be losing a lot of business because of shoddy SEO practices.

Luckily, you can completely mitigate this issue through a proper contractor SEO strategy.

By optimizing your website, you’ll see short-term results such as higher ranking and more clicks, as well as long-term results that will include improved brand awareness and higher revenue.

Benefits of a contractor SEO strategy

Here are just a few of the benefits you’ll experience if you improve your SEO practices:

1. Competitive advantage: higher rankings won’t only help you get the best of your competition, but they also help you level the playing field against bigger companies with larger marketing budgets.

2. Brand awareness: if the name of your company keeps appearing in search results time and time again, it's going to stick in the minds of your target audience. So the next time they search for a contractor, they will likely click on your website because your name will seem familiar by then.

3. Decrease in marketing costs: while a full-fledged SEO marketing strategy might cost you a bit, it’s only a fraction of the price you’d dish out for traditional advertising. We can also describe SEO as evergreen since you’ll probably keep seeing the results of your marketing efforts in the foreseeable future.

4. Increase in revenue: you can’t rush greatness and the same applies to your contractor SEO. While you won’t see immediate results, you’ll gain new opportunities to grow your revenue exponentially in the long run.

How to optimize your website?

Implementing a SEO strategy can be overwhelming. That’s why it might be worth it to partner up with a digital marketing agency that knows a thing or two about contractor SEO. Still, it doesn’t hurt to be familiar with the process of optimizing a website.

Your run-of-the-mill SEO strategy should always include these four crucial elements:

1. Keyword research 

SEO starts with keywords. Think about what search queries your audience uses when looking for a contractor. You can think of general ones like a contractor, or more specific keywords like renovation contractor. 

What matters most is to know there are two types of keywords you can use:

• Short-tail: a keyword that’s general and covers a broad topic. For instance, the term contractor could cover different types of user intents, from looking for contractor services to simply looking for a description of the job.
• Long-tail: a specific keyword that contains more words and provides more detail to search engines and, as a result, yields a clearer search intent.

Because short-tail keywords have higher search volume, you might be tempted to use them more. However, targeting long tail keywords yields better results. Your website might appear in fewer search results, but the upside is that your website will be put in front of relevant users who are usually the ones that generate profit.

There are countless ways to analyze keywords and see how they’re performing. The first one is Google Keywords Planner, which helps you identify new keyword ideas, but also allows you to see which keywords your competitors are using. 

Additionally, you can use Google Search Console to discover how users are visiting your site as well as how your website is performing for different search terms. 

If that fails, you can go to social media and sites like Quora to see what your target audience is talking about. For instance, they might be interested in learning how long a renovation might take, the best contractors in a particular area, advantages, and the average cost of hiring a contractor.

2. Make your website user friendly

Even with the best contractor SEO strategy in place, you’re not going to see results if the user experience on your website is poor. If you have slow loading speeds, for instance, the users that land on your site will probably give up and go to your competitor's website. 

To make matters worse, search engines take into account the bounce rate (the percentage of users who leave your site without completing action), as well as the speed of your website. That means that if you don’t address this issue, your SEO strategy won’t yield favorable results.

If your website is full of hiccups, you can try a few things:

1. Reducing your HTTP request

2. Compressing the images on your site

3. Merging JavaScript files with CSS files

Next, you need to make sure your website is mobile-friendly. Not only do search engines rely on the mobile-first index, but more than half of internet traffic, in general, comes from mobile devices like phones or tablets.

This is especially important for contractors who made their site a while back - the times when mobile wasn’t the focus of web design. If that’s true, you might be in dire need of a complete web redesign.

3. Think about off-page elements

You might be thinking: ‘’So all I have to do is research keywords and improve my website and my contractor SEO will be on point?’’

Wrong!

Search engines also consider your website’s overall reputation. Off-page elements such as mentions and links on other websites play a crucial role in the overall ranking of your site. The more frequently your name pops up in other places online, you’ll have greater visibility and in turn, your site is more likely to rank higher in searches.

This is why a large slice of your contractor SEO strategy should be outreach. It means that in order to boost the organic ranking of your business, you’ll need to create links off-website that link back to your site - aka backlinks.

Pro tip: Don’t ignore your social media pages. A lot of users browse social media to find purchase advice, but you can also use these pages to direct them to your website. 

4. Measure the results of your contractor SEO strategy 

Once everything is in full gear, the battle has just begun. Marketing strategies are never set in stone, and even though you researched a keyword, the results can never be 100% accurate. That’s why you’ll need to measure if the strategy you’ve implemented is working so you can tweak it until it leads to favorable results.

That also goes for periodic tweaking. For example, you might rank well for the time being, but your competitor might also start their SEO strategy and outrank you. By monitoring analytics, you can adapt your strategy to stay where you rightfully belong - on the top.

Start your contractor SEO journey now!

That’s everything you need to know to start your contractor SEO marketing journey. If you take your time and try to implement these steps to the fullest, you will see results.

The truth is that SEO isn’t that complicated as most people do it. Yet, the question is: do you have the time to do it properly? As someone with little to no experience in this field you’ll probably need to sacrifice a lot of time to research the keywords, optimize your website, start an outreach strategy, and measure results. 

If you’d rather communicate with your clients and supervise workers during renovations instead of wondering if you picked the wrong keyword - contact Oamii. 

We’re a digital marketing agency that’s helped many businesses like yours implement a contractor SEO strategy to great success. We’ll take you under our wing, complete a comprehensive competitive analysis, build you a responsive website, and help you get high-quality leads and customers. 

Contact Oamii now by filling out our online contact form, or call us at 561-228-4111 and we’ll help your business grow through tried and tested contractor SEO strategies. Who knows - since you now know a thing or two about SEO, you might be able to give us a keyword or two!