Guide To SEO For The Construction Industry

Digital marketing strategies haven’t always been a top priority for construction companies. However, in today’s digital world, a strong SEO strategy has become a necessity. This is particularly true if you operate in an area where there are dozens of other companies in your sphere.

It’s vital that your construction business finds a way to distinguish itself from others in the area, and SEO is an important way to stand out and win that competitive edge.

Without this, you might find that your business gets lost in the sea of other options on the internet, and you start getting overlooked for jobs.

The good news is we’ve created the following guide to support your construction business on your SEO journey. Below, we’re going to answer the following four questions:

• What is SEO?
• What role does SEO play in the construction industry?
• What are the different SEO strategies?
• How can you guarantee SEO success?

Let’s get started.

Let’s start by taking a quick look at what search engine optimisation (SEO) is for anyone who is completely new to the concept.

In a nutshell, SEO is the practice of organically improving the quality and quantity of visitors to your company website through search engines, as well as increasing the rankings of your web pages. This is done through a number of techniques such as link building and creating keyword optimised content.

The keywords, links, metadata, etc., that are carefully crafted through SEO techniques are used by search engines to gather information and index your pages. Algorithms then analyse the pages within an index and order these pages accordingly on search engine results pages (SERPs).

This is what impacts how well your web pages rank for relevant searches.

This is a very simplistic explanation, but ultimately, the end goal of SEO is to drive more customers to your website and win you more business.

As we said before, marketing wasn’t always something that construction professionals had to concern themselves with. However, there is a lot of competition in the construction industry right now; therefore, businesses need to do everything they can to stand out and win contracts.

This is where SEO comes in.

A strong SEO strategy can help to make your construction website as visible as possible, making it appear as high as possible in SERPs, particularly within the local area.

It helps your web pages to rank for relevant search terms. For example, if you offer bricklaying, groundwork, drainage, etc., you want to rank well on SERPs for relevant search terms related to these services.

This helps to drive more high-quality traffic to your website so that more customers can find your services.

There are two key types of SEO strategy, on-site and off-site. These categories are broken down further into lots of different techniques that you can use to boost your SEO, and often, it is a combination of multiple techniques that will lead to the best results.

We’ll now take a look at the different strategies in more detail, looking at how these can be applied to the construction industry.

On-site SEO encompasses everything that you do to optimise your website to help your pages rank better on search engines. Here are some of the different techniques you can use for on-site SEO:

One of the most common and important parts of search engine optimisation is keywords.

This is the process of researching, analysing and selecting the right keywords and phrases to target to help drive traffic from relevant searches to your website.

These keywords can be single words or longer phrases, and they should be some of the most commonly searched for words and phrases in your industry and services.

These words and phrases need to be weaved seamlessly throughout your content and web pages. These can be quite competitive in the construction industry, but the proper use of keywords can help to drive more traffic to your website.

Title tags, alt tags and meta descriptions are also important for helping search engines to index your pages, allowing them to rank better.

But these words mean nothing if you don’t know what they are, so we’re going to explain, giving examples of how these apply to the construction industry. For the purpose of this section, the example keywords we will be using are ‘building company’.

Title tags are a little bit of HTML that is used by search engine algorithms to identify the title of your page. They are essentially the clickable headline that will appear in the search results, letting users know what your page is about.

These don’t need to be too long, but they should include your primary keyword or phrase. For example, ‘Lawrence Smith: Building company in Kent’.

Getting these keywords in there is crucial for search engines to be able to find your content and rank it according to the relevant search terms.

Another element of HTML, meta descriptions are the brief description you see underneath a title that lets you know what the page or website is about.

This can be slightly longer than the title, typically between 180-230 characters, and needs to read coherently whilst including keywords and phrases. It should also aim to entice the reader to click on your page over others. An example could be:

Lawrence Smith is a family run building company based in Kent that caters to all the construction needs, including scaffolding, groundwork and drainage.

Finally, we have alt tags. These can be added to your HTML codes and are a description given to any visual elements in your pages, such as videos or images.

These are helpful if the visual element does not display properly on the screen, but including keywords in these descriptions also helps to boost your SEO efforts.

So, for example, if you have a photo of a team of workers, the photo might be called ‘building company team at work’.

Another important part of your on-site SEO strategy needs to be the structure of your website. SEO and web design go hand in hand, and there are several things you can do to help crawlers rank your website higher on SERPs.

Here are some ways you can ensure that you have a well-structured website for your construction company that will help to boost your SEO:

• Make sure your design is responsive and mobile-friendly: Did you know over 60% of online searches now happen through mobile devices? And responsiveness plays a role in your website’s ranking authority
• Ensure fast loading speeds: The speed of your website can impact how high it ranks on SERPs as users don’t like to wait more than one or two seconds for web pages to load
• Make it easy to navigate: The layout and structure of your website are so important. Clunky or difficult to navigate websites could cause visitors to abandon your site quickly; this reflects badly on your website and could damage your rankings. Therefore a simple structure is crucial

One final on-site strategy that’s important is link building. Getting a strong strategy in place to help you secure quality backlinks is vital.

This is because the more people that link back to your web pages and content, the higher the authority and, therefore, the ranking of your website.

Not only this, but the authority of the sites linking back to your web pages holds a lot of weight too. For example, in the construction industry, earning links from trusted sites like Construction UK Magazine and Construction News can help to increase your rankings.

The opposite of on-site SEO, off-site search engine optimisation includes everything you do to boost your rankings that takes place outside of your own website. Here are some of the most beneficial off-site strategies:

As well as the content on your own website, it can be a nice idea to try and get some content placed onto other web pages outside of your own. Content marketing can be a whole other strategy in itself, so we won’t go too deep, but if you simply want to dabble, securing spots, guides or articles on other websites is great for SEO.

This also helps you to secure links back to your own website, helping with your link building strategy.

That said, as a business construction company, you might be worried you do not have time to do this yourself, but the good news is there are service providers out there that can write the content for you and get this posted on other websites.

On Google My Business, you can claim a business listing that ensures all the information given by Google about your business is correct. It is a free service that can help customers to find your services much quicker and easier.

This listing could include your business address, phone number, website, operating hours or pictures of your work and team. Anything that customers might need to know to help them make a decision about whether to use your services or not.

You should also be sure to claim any other listings about your business, which in the construction industry could be found on sites like Check a Trade. This way, you can ensure all the information is accurate and up to date.

Between your website, Google, social media and other platforms, there are lots of places that customers can leave reviews about your services online. Believe it or not, these reviews can be a great way to boost your SEO – particularly if you’re securing one good review after another.

In the construction industry, this could mean securing feedback on platforms like Trust A Trader, as well as more generic places like Trust Pilot.

For this reason, it’s a good idea to encourage customers to leave reviews after you’ve worked with them, especially if you know they were very happy. You could, on occasion, even incentivise past customers to leave feedback online, perhaps offering something like a voucher for the randomly selected winner.

It’s also important to respond to as many of these reviews as possible, whether positive or negative, thanking them for their feedback and potentially resolving any issues if they’ve not been completely satisfied.

Something we have yet to mention is your local SEO strategy. Now, this can be a built-in part of your overall strategy, but it is definitely something you need to focus on, particularly in the construction industry.

Customers typically want to work with local construction companies, and you probably don’t want to be travelling hundreds of miles for work each day. Therefore, you want to appear in relevant searches for your local area. The way to do this is to include your village, town or city in your keywords.

You should also take advantage of tools like Google Maps and Apple Maps and make sure that you claim all your business listings as we’ve mentioned above and add your correct business address.

All of this will help to improve your chances of showing up in local related searches, helping you to beat out your top competition.

In this final section, we’ve pulled together some of our top tips for SEO success, offering a little recap on some of our earlier points. The most important ways to achieve SEO success include:

• Conducting thorough keyword research within the construction industry and locally to assess how competitive they are and ensure you’re targeting the right keywords
• Always write high-quality and genuinely helpful content for your customers no matter what is it, weaving in keywords where possible
• Keep on top of the usability of your website, making sure it always loads quickly and that it is mobile-friendly
• Make sure to claim any listings attributed to your company and always keep these up to date
• Don’t forget about off-site SEO; asking customers to leave feedback online can be very helpful
• You can also do the same with social media, as lots of people like to leave comments on places like Facebook
• Which leads to the final point, it’s a good idea to have at least one associated social media platform like Facebook, but you might wish to have two or three if you can manage these

Follow this advice for a strong and successful SEO strategy, and you could start winning new business right away. And though it can seem a bit daunting at first, getting a good strategy in place makes it much easier in the long run.

Not to mention that there are lots of SEO, content and social media providers out there that can help your business achieve SEO success if you are too busy to take on the challenge yourself.