Regardless of what type of business you have, if you can't get your website ranking high on Google you're going to have a harder time achieving success.
With contracting, the competition can be quite fierce due to the relatively low barrier to entry into the market. One day your best technician is representing your business and the next day they've decided to start their own contracting company.
And so it goes, year after year. On average, our data indicates roughly 340 new contractor companies start each year.
Let's stop right here, did you know there where different types of SEO and different techniques used for each?
With all this new competition, not to mention the big brands, if you want to establish your dominance in this digital world, you need to make sure that your business appears at the top of the search engine results for your relevant keywords. And that's exactly where Search Engine Optimization comes in.
In this blog post, we'll take a look at what Search Engine Optimization really is, and we'll also examine the different types of SEO.
Let's stop right here, did you know there where different types of SEO and different techniques used for each?
Everything You Need To Know To Get Ranked:
What Is Search Engine Optimization?
Types Of SEO
Top Benefits Of SEO For Your Contract Business
What Is Search Engine Optimization?
According to Neil Patel, who many consider to be the godfather of SEO “Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of optimizing your website’s content, such that search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc. prefer to show it as the top result for specific keywords. By focusing on SEO, businesses can increase their website traffic as well as generate a wide range of high-quality leads.”
For instance, what if one of your potential customers is looking for a solution to her problem?
In that case, she’d simply head over to Google and type in the problem. Once she hits “Enter,” she will be provided with a plethora of different companies offering contractor services. If your business doesn’t appear at the top or on the first page, you’d be missing out on nearly 90% of your overall customers.
In essence, SEO primarily drives two things:
Rankings
Visibility
Rankings
It’s a process that’s equipped by the search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc. to determine a website’s rankings. These ranking algorithms are top secret and constantly evolving. Put differently, this is the search engines process for determining what website their users are looking for.
Make no mistake, Google's only concern is connecting their users with the information they think they're looking for. The reality is, Google is making an educated guess based on three factors:
What the user typed into the search bar
What signals your website/digital presence gives
How closely #1 and #2 above match
Visibility
This term is all about describing the prominence of your website’s domain on the search engine results. You will be subject to higher visibility if your domain is prominent in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). But if it isn’t, you will be subject to lower visibility.
Get your SEO right and to the victor come the spoils. The spoils in this case include:
Cost-Effective Lead Generation
Increase In Website Traffic
Higher Visibility In Your Niche
Long-Term Results
Increase In Brand’s Visibility
Better Usability
Leads To An Outstanding User Experience
Increase In Awareness Of Your Contractor Brand
So why is this so important, other than the obvious? According to our good friends at Backlinko, the top search result gets nearly 32% of all SERP clicks.
Now that we know what SEO is, let’s take a look at the different types of SEO.
Types Of SEO You Need To Know About
Here’s a list of the major SEO types you should know about:
On-Page SEO
Off-Page SEO
Technical SEO
Local SEO
On-Page SEO
On-Page SEO also referred to as On-Site SEO, it's the process of optimizing different front-end as well as back-end components of a website, such that its rankings improve on the search engines and leads to increase in high-quality traffic to the website.
Here’s a list of the various on-page SEO elements you should consider:
Website Speed - Website speed is defined as the length of time it takes to display all the content for the average page of a website. When it comes to download speed, the faster the better.
Mobile Responsiveness - This refers to how compatible the website is on mobile devices. For my clients, more than 50% of their website traffic is mobile.
Internal Linking - Internal linking is basically linking from one of your website pages to another in the body of the page and of course when it makes sense to the context of the copy.
Page URLs - Having page URLs that make sense to the reader instead of a bunch of website code gibberish and include keywords are great for SEO.
Structured Markup - Structured data, also called schema markup, is a type of code that makes it easier for search engines to crawl, organize, and display your content
Image Alt-text - Alt text is the written copy that appears in place of an image on a webpage if the image fails to load on a user's screen. This text helps screen-reading tools describe images to visually impaired readers and allows search engines to better crawl and rank your website.
Meta Descriptions - A meta description is an HTML element that describes and summarizes the contents of your page for the benefit of users and search engines.
Header Tags - HTML header tags are used to differentiate the headings (h1) and sub-headings (h2-h6) of a page from the rest of the content. These tags are also known to webmasters as heading tags or simply header tags.
Page Titles - A page title, also known as a title tag, is a short description of a webpage and appears at the top of a browser window and in SERPs.
High-Quality Content - This is probably the most straight forward of the group. Each page of your website should have good quality content with at least 200 words.
Use of Keywords - Make sure you are using the keywords that are relevant to your users. For example, the term "Contractor" is significantly more popular among consumers than the term "Contracting".
Off-Page SEO
Off-Page SEO, also referred to as Off-Site SEO, refers to various activities that you as well as others will be performing away from your website in order to improve its rankings on search engine results for specific keywords.
Here are the four most important factors of Off-Page SEO:
Domain Authority - The domain authority of a website describes its relevance for a specific subject area or industry.
Page Authority - The page authority of a website describes its relevance for a specific subject area or industry for that specific page.
Bounce Rate - Bounce rate is an Internet marketing term used in web traffic analysis. It represents the percentage of visitors who enter the site and then leave rather than continuing to view other pages within the same site.
Domain Age - In simple terms, “Domain Age” refers to the amount of time during which a domain name has existed. It is how old a domain name is. So for example, if a domain name was registered in 2010, the domain age will be 10 years by 2020.
Here are the top Off-Page SEO tricks that you need to know about:
Create Shareable Content - The idea here is that you would create content that other people would be interested in reading. This content might come in the form of blog posts or social media would ultimately link back to your website.
Backlinks - Put simply, a backlink is when one website links to your website. If you have a Facebook page and link to your website from that page you have just created a backlink.
Influencer Outreach - In a gist, influencer outreach involves persuading influential leaders, even celebrities, to promote your brand. This promotion takes many different forms, like sending tweets, creating videos, or wearing a T-shirt but should ultimately drive website traffic when used in this case.
Publish Guest Posts - Publishing a guest post is basically creating content for the sole purpose of publishing that content on another website who will in turn link to your website.
Social Media Engagement - Social media can drive more traffic to your search-optimized pages, improving both your social media visibility and your engagement.
Technical SEO
Technical SEO refers to the website as well as server optimizations that help the search engine spiders to crawl as well as index your website much more effectively.
It’s just anything that will make your website easier for the search engine spiders to crawl as well as index.
Here’s how you can improve your website’s technical SEO:
Ensure That Your Website Is Mobile-Friendly
Improve Your Website’s Speed - check out Google page speed test
Create & Optimize Your XML Sitemap
Include Main Keywords In The Image-Alt Text
Optimize Internal Links
Install An SSL Certificate For Your Contractor Website
Look For & Fix The Broken Links On Your Website
Utilize Canonical URLs For Avoiding Duplicate Content Issues
Perform A Technical SEO Audit
Local SEO
As we took a look at in the previous blog posts, Local SEO is all about optimizing the content on your website to attract local prospects and customers.
Since most contractor businesses service a defined geography, you might be looking to attract your audience from your local neighborhood. Hence, it's really vital for you to focus on your Local SEO efforts.
Here’s how you can improve your Local SEO:
Claim Your Business Listings - A business listing is an online list of businesses within a particular niche, location, or category. Some examples include, Google My Business, Yelp, Facebook, Yellow Pages and many more.
Add-In Location Pages To Your Contractor Website - If you service a large area with distinctive towns or cities it's a good idea to have a page for each of those service areas.
Improve NAP Consistency (NAP: Name, Address, Phone Number) - NAP is an important ranking factor and should be consistent. The reasons for this are threefold: citations can help (or hinder) your search ranking, they can aid local business discovery, and they can make or break a new customer's trust in your business. We offer a free NAP scan here.
Optimize Your “Google My Business” listing - For more details on managing your Google My Business listing read our guest post on the Contracting Management Professionals Contractor Talk blog.
Ask Your Customers To Leave Reviews - Great reviews are a key ranking factor for Google. Your average score, the number of reviews and recency are all important elements for your reviews. We've automated the review process so our contracting owners get more reviews.
Acquire Backlinks From Credible Sources - Starting a new business? Have a new product? Have a unique story to tell? Get the word out to local news sources and organizations like the chamber of commerce and be sure to get links back to your website.
Conduct Local Link Building - Do you belong to a local business networking group or have an agreement with another related service? These are great relations to develop and they are usually open to linking to your website from theirs.
Equip Social Media Marketing - Google and Bing have confirmed that Twitter and Facebook profiles influence SEO results. So do, Google+, LinkedIn and others. The more your business is talked about, the better place it gets in the search results. When your customers search for your brand, your social media profiles show up in the results as well.
Now, that we know all about the different types of SEO, lets’ take a look at the top benefits of SEO.
Top Benefits Of SEO For A Contractor Business
Here are the benefits you will be subject to:
Better User Experience
Increase In Website Traffic
Cost-Effective Tactic
Higher Conversion Rate
Build Your Contractor Brand’s Credibility
Better User Experience
One of the most important aspects of a digital marketing strategy is to make sure that you are delivering the best possible experience to your audience. What if your website’s loading speed is incredibly poor? Or what if your contractor website isn't mobile-friendly.
With SEO, you will be optimizing your website such that you are delivering the best possible experience to your target audience out there. You'll be providing your audience with relevant information, creating easy to navigate website pages as well as a mobile-friendly website.
This will ultimately lead to an outstanding user experience, which will result in more clicks, followed by more leads and higher conversion rates.
Increase In Website Traffic
By focusing on some specific keywords, you will be improving your website’s search engine rankings. With an increase in rankings, you will witness the number of people visiting your website increase at an exponential rate. Not only will you be attracting a wide range of traffic towards your website, but most of them will be of high-quality.
What this means is that there’s a higher probability of converting them into paying customers. With SEO, you will be focusing on every single aspect of your contractor website such as your website loading speed, content, user experience, which will ultimately bring your visitors further down their buyer’s journey.
Cost-Effective Tactic
Gone are the days when businesses had to spend thousands of dollars on traditional marketing tactics to promote their brand as well as product and services. You won't have to create pamphlets to let people in your neighborhood know that you deliver the best contractor services in town.
This means that you will save thousands of dollars, which you previously used to allocate for your traditional marketing budget.
Instead, all you need to do is to focus on your SEO and soon, you will witness a huge amount of traffic visiting your website. But the thing is you need to do it RIGHT.
Alongside this, you won't have to spend much money on optimizing your website.
Higher Conversion Rate
With an increase in rankings, you will witness high-quality traffic visiting your contractor website. As your website is SEO-friendly, they will love exploring your website even more. They’ll head over to your services and products page.
And if they really are impressed, they might be buying one of your products or reaching out to you for their contractor needs.
This will result in higher conversion rates. Your customers will become familiar with your brand even more. Alongside this, they will even come back for more and might even refer to your contractor services or products to their friends as well as family members.
Build Your Contractor Brand’s Credibility
If your contractor business isn’t credible, your prospects and customers might not even prefer to get in touch with you. People, nowadays are extremely careful before involving them with a business. And if they get in touch with you, chances are that you are doing it right.
If your brand doesn’t appear as credible and trustworthy, then you will simply be missing out on a whole lot of your customers. In the end, it’d all be a waste of your big bucks.
And that’s what SEO will help you with. By optimizing your website for SEO, you will be positioning yourself as a contractor brand that’s credible and trustworthy.
Conclusion
SEO’s one of the most vital elements of your digital marketing strategy but as you can see it can be very comprehensive as well. If you haven’t already started focusing on your website’s SEO, you are making a huge mistake for your business.
If you're looking to grow your contractor business, take the first step today, and learn how we can help with our all-in-one contractor marketing platform.