seo for construction companies, builders & trades

We have been providing WordPress SEO services to builders and construction companies since 2006, from general builders, to specific trades and suppliers. We have a wealth of experience providing SEO to the industry and are experienced in turning website visitors into enquiries!

While industry experience isn’t essential, we do find that it’s beneficial to understand your market, plus some of the research we need to do for each customer has already been done.  For example, we may know that a particular directory is good for generating leads, another might offer a quality back link, while the next may be of no benefit whatsoever. Understanding your customer base or target market is also important. Having already worked with various trades, we already know for example, that potential customers search for “electricians” if they are a domestic householder, whereas commercial clients or main contractors search for “electrical contractors”. (assuming they don’t already have preferred suppliers of course). This level of knowledge can mean the difference between improving your ranks in the search results for the right terms and increasing traffic, or chasing our tail until the client pulls the plug.

WordPress Website Expertise

We’ve been in business optimising and building websites since 2006. Most of that time has been working exclusively with WordPress. So if you already have a WordPress Website and you need SEO we know how to make it rank, see more about our WordPress seo services. Or if you need a website updated or are a new business who don’t have a website yet, we can build you an affordable, SEO friendly website. Regardless if you need SEO or a new website built, we can optimise it for national or local search results.

The Process of Optimising a Construction Companies Website

The general process with SEO for construction companies or builders is, on the whole, very much the same as any other industry. Larger construction companies want national coverage, whereas smaller trades usually need local SEO to promote their construction services in the search engines to the local market. Very broadly, the process is as follows:

Fixing Technical Errors First

We begin by identifying any technical issues which could be holding the site back in Googles search results.  These can be things like the site not being responsive (working properly on mobiles and tablets), being too slow, lacking schema markup, having poor navigation or lots of broken links. All of these, and many more create a poor user experience, they’re also are factors in the search engines algorithms which determine which website ranks how high for each search term. In recent years the speed has become increasingly important, we can often make a website rank better just by making it load faster.

Once any technical issues are resolved you may well start to see an increase in ranks and visitors to your website. Once they are landing on the website, we can steer them to your sales pages and encourage an action, usually a phone call or sending an enquiry.. 

Keyword Research Forms the Basis of our Strategy

Next we begin keyword research to decide which pages will be developed to target which search terms and phrases, for many construction companies it’s quite straight forward, but there are exceptions to the rule.  This is decided on the basis of which terms people actually search for, how competitive they are and the realistic chances of getting your site to a point where people are clicking on it.

On Page Analysis and Search Engine Optimisation

Once we know what we are targeting, the on-page SEO work begins, we can adapt various elements of the website, many of which are invisible to the site user, to make sure you have the best chance of appearing for the selected keywords and terms (search engine optimisation). These include things like improving or adding alt tags for images, updating titles and descriptions to encourage more clicks and optimising images for speed of loading.

Then there are the visible factors, first and foremost the copy (the actual text on a page) we often find that while it does promote you as a construction business, it may not answer peoples questions, may not mention some of the services you offer, or is simply too short for Google to rank in their search engine.  In this case we will work with you to develop the text to appeal equally to customers and search engines. At the same time we make sure the page is structured properly with the right headings and so it looks visually appealing which encourages your target audience to stay on the page which is a positive signal to a search engine and can help improve search engine results.

Off Page Factors

Off page SEO comes down to who links to you, how much authority they have, how related the websites are and even the words they use in the link.  The days of acquiring numerous links irrespective of their source are long gone and are more likely to cause harm to your search results than be beneficial.  We ensure that any existing links are having a positive effect, remove any which aren’t of good quality and build new ones which we know are beneficial to a construction company. As a general rule of thumb, links from other construction companies are a good thing, so if you have friends in the industry, see if they’ll give you a back-link.

Everything Else

Social media can also be helpful when you are a construction company who provides services to domestic customers, people often look there for recommendations, so a presence is usually a positive thing. Google also looks at businesses social accounts for validation purposes, such as checking consistent name, address and phone data.