SEO for Construction Companies

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) involves moving your website up search engine ranking positions. You don’t directly pay Google to be there – that’s PPC.

In SEO, you naturally move up the rankings with certain techniques. That’s why it is often referred to as organic or natural search.

Why do construction companies need SEO?

Because if you rank well in Google, you will get more customers.

And like all businesses, companies in the construction sector can benefit from an increase in traffic to their website.

By ranking at the top of the search engines, like Google or Bing, SEO helps more potential leads find your company online.

Even if you have a stream of referrals, or your customers find out about you via word-of-mouth, SEO helps to add to that. Ensuring you have a steady stream of business each month.

How Google works…

Google takes into account over 200 ranking factors when deciding how high up the rankings your website should appear.

Regardless of your industry, these 200+ ranking factors can be broadly split into 3 areas:

1. On-site SEO
2. Off-site SEO
3. Technical SEO

Your SEO needs to target all 3 of these areas to help improve your ranking positions. Which we will cover in the next section…

8 SEO tips for construction companies

As mentioned above, Google looks at 200 ranking factors when judging your website.

In this next section, we look at some of the most important ones that a construction company may face. If you put these 8 SEO tips into action, your website will improve.

On-Site SEO

This is the first of our 3 areas of SEO (on-site, off-site, technical). And the main goal here is to put keywords in the right place on your website, and to ensure you have relevant content that is useful for potential customers.

1. Create a keyword list (keyword research)

One of the first things you should do is to create a relevant list of keywords relating to your services. You can carry out keyword research without the use of any paid SEO tools.

Are you a design and build company or just a construction firm?

Do you work with residential clients, commercial, or both?

Not only this, what services do you want to focus on? If you only want to attract customers searching for house renovations or kitchen extensions, then just note these down.

These questions will help you figure out what kind of keywords you’d want to target.

Once you have a list of services relating to your business, you can then use SEO tools to build on this list and find the search volumes.

Keyword Research Tools

Ubersuggest can help you find relevant keywords relating to your business as well as showing you the average monthly search volume. This can help your prioritise your SEO-workload as you might want to only focus on high search volume services.

In the example below, you may use the wording “design and build contractors” over “design and build company” because it gets more searches.

Answer the Public is another great tool if you’re looking for content ideas. Add a keyword and you will see lots of questions people are asking on Google, relating to that service. You can include these as sections on your website or in your FAQs.

And then there are a whole host of paid SEO tools that will give you more in-depth data. Such as SEMrush, Ahrefs, and keyword.io.

2. Write unique service pages (content creation)

Once you have a list of keywords and search volumes relating to your business, you can then create new pages for your website.

Nearly every service you sell should have its own page. For example, “design and build”, “house extensions”, “loft conversions” and “basement conversions” would all have their own pages.

You need to make sure the content you add to these pages is unique and explains your process.

As tempting as it is to use another website’s content, Google doesn’t like this.

Google likes to rank a unique page that is dedicated to a user’s search. So if you have a page on “house renovations” and a user searches for this, then Google would show this as a result.

But be careful with this, don’t go overboard and create too many pages for sub-services. You don’t want to create a page for “dormer loft conversions” and “mansard loft conversions”, as well as a “loft conversion” page. Just one page about “loft conversions” would work best.

3. On-page optimisations

Now you’ve created different pages for your services, you will need to optimise elements on those pages to help Google find it.

You may have heard of title tags, meta descriptions, and alt tags. These are all elements that you can optimise to help Google understand what your page is about.

One of the most important is the title tag and you need to make sure it’s descriptive and relates to your service and where you operate. If you build basements in London, your title tag might be “Basement Conversion Specialists in London”

You can use a tool like SERPsim to see how your page will appear in the results.

Off-Site SEO

Now you have pages for each of your services, you need to start increasing the authority of your website. This is area two of SEO (on-site, off-site, technical).

You can view off-site SEO as building your company’s reputation online …and Google’s the judge!

The main goal is to increase the total number of websites that talk about and link to you.

4. Increase your backlinks (link building)

We’ve all heard of backlinks. Usually from an univitied email into our inbox asking if we want to buy backlinks to “boost our SEO”! And we suggest avoiding low-quality link building services like this.

It’s true that backlinks can really help a website rank better in Google.

But only if they are from high-quality websites, relevant to your industry.

A lot of these low-quality link building companies will direct links to your website that could have the opposite effect. Or worse, get your site penalised.

Below we outline some easy ways for you to gain links…

Directories

This is the easiest way to get a good foundation of links to your website. Directories will list your website and it can help to show Google that you are a company with a real address.

Just make sure you use the same Name, Address, and Phone number (NAP) across all of the directories you submit to. This is so you don’t confuse Google with different addresses.

You have national directories like Yell, bt.com, and b2blistings.com. And then you have industry-relevant directories like Home Building, constructionenquirer.com, and construction.co.uk.

Don’t go overboard and only submit your website to relevant directories.

Relationships: suppliers

Do you have relationships with suppliers, such as building material providers or architects? Then you may be able to use this relationship to get a link to your website.

You can try speaking to people in your industry that you work with regularly.

Do they endorse your work?

Great, they could feature your project on their site showing what you’ve built with their materials.

Sit down and have a think, you may be able to gain some links from some existing relationships.

Guest posting

This is a great way to build links back to your website. You write a blog post that goes on an industry publication or website, and then you link to a relevant page on your website within that blog post.

This helps to signal to Google that you’re active in your industry and that you have a good reputation. All of this helps to provide signals that will help your pages rank higher.

5. Local SEO

Because a lot of work in the construction industry is done locally, it means local SEO plays an important role. Customers want to find a company that’s near to them so Google will often show a “map pack” to customers:

To appear in the map pack, you need to set up a Google My Business (GMB) page. GMB is a free service from Google which allows you to list your company, outlining what you do and what time you’re open.

You can choose what type of company you are from the list (e.g. “building materials supplier”, “construction company”, “custom home builder” and so on…)

This allows you to appear on Google Maps for related searches and it also allows you to take reviews for your business. Which will help to signal to Google you’re a real business.

6. Online reviews

Getting reviews from your customers will help to improve your Google My Business page. This will let you rank higher in the Map Pack and attract new customers.

But not only that, 90% of people read online reviews before visiting a business. Which means they are essential to customers when evaluating you and the competition.

Direct customers (even ones from a couple of months ago) to your Google My Business page to leave a review. This will help to provide social proof.

And if a customer has already left a bad review, don’t worry. Respond to the criticism and show that you’ve learnt from this. Customers will appreciate this.

Technical SEO

This is the final of our 3 areas of SEO (on-site, off-site, technical). A lot of construction firms don’t have large websites, which means they don’t need to worry about technical SEO too much. But there are still some key problems most websites face.

7. Mobile-friendly / responsive website

With smartphone use on the rise and Google mobile searches, you need to ensure your website is ‘responsive’. This means it can be used on any device including mobile, desktop, and tablet.

Not only this, Google has moved to a mobile-first index.

This means they rank your website based on the mobile view, not the desktop like they used to.

So if your mobile homepage has information about the construction services you offer, but your desktop doesn’t, you will find it hard to rank well.

The easiest way to check this is to pull out your smartphone and look at your website. Does it have all of the relevant content on there? If you do, then you’re okay.

8. Website loading times

Google doesn’t usually announce ranking factors. But on one rare occasion, they stated that page speed was a ranking factor. Because they announced this, it should be taken very seriously.

You can test your website with a tool such as Google PageSpeed Insights. This will let you see how well it performs on a scale of 0 to 100.

So, how fast should my page be…

There isn’t really an exact speed you should aim for. It’s essentially, the faster the better. And quicker than your competition!

Google has released data on how a slow web page increases bounce rates. In short, customers go elsewhere when a page is slow!

Enter a keyword into Google that you want to rank for e.g. “construction companies london”. Then take the top 5 websites ranking for this term and run them through Google’s speed tool. You want to be quicker than all of these websites.

Summary

We hope that’s given you an idea of what SEO for construction companies looks like. It’s not an easy process but it’s one you can begin today.

You want to make sure you cover the three areas of SEO: On-site SEO, Off-site SEO and Technical SEO. When you do this you will be covering all angles.

The biggest problem we see that construction firms face is time!

Like most businesses, you are focused on doing what you do best. And the long process of learning SEO can be low down on that list.

If this sounds like you, please get in touch on the form below and we’ll see if we can help you out.