SEO for Contractors, Home Builders, & Remodelers
SEO is one the most valuable marketing strategies for contractors and home builders to sustain the growth of their business over time. There are a limited number of clients and leads in each city, leaving the competition in the remodeling industry to be low-volume but high ticket leads. Most potential clients are going to shop around options too, so if your business can separate itself from the competition even 50% of the time, you’re going to be taking a large portion of the leads in your area.
Providing these clients with media of past work, positive reviews, and an overall beautiful and optimized site can show that you are serious about the work you do for homeowners in the area.
Let's talk about some of the top questions remodeling companies have for us about SEO.
What is SEO?
SEO stands for search engine optimization. Search engine optimization is the practice and art of understanding and using search engine algorithms to your advantage to boost rankings. When thinking about SEO, we are working to convince google and the users visiting our site that we are the authority figure and best business in the area for home construction work.
The more overall and consistent presence we show online, the more google trusts that we are a legitimate business. Posting content and media every day on the website and social media? Google crawls this and sees this as a positive sign of activity. Receiving positive reviews on your Google My Business account? Google understands that other users are providing feedback on you and shows you as more legitimate in their eyes. Have a fast website that loads for mobile and desktop users? Google sees that you are putting effort into making sure that users are able to use your site properly and consistently.
Another good sign. That’s what SEO is… Providing trust to google through the optimization for clients through keywords, accessibility, and activity. Keeping this idea of user-friendliness and authority at the corner of all the decisions you make on your website will provide you with better rankings in the long run.
Why does SEO matter?
With search traffic increasing year-over-year, SEO has provided a larger opportunity of clients and sales for businesses both online and mortar. Your website operates as a digital storefront for your business, providing clients with a glimpse of the services and work you offer.
Keeping this digital storefront active, proper and clean will automatically qualify you to users and google as reliable before they even meet you.
Home builders and remodelers rely on their websites even more to show the previous work that they have finished for other clients through videos and images. Most homeowners have a style or type of look that they envision for their next home project. Using media like this allows potential clients to see your style and versatility and get excited about their next project.
10 Best things to Improve your SEO
While working with multiple award-winning home builders, we have found these areas of SEO to work extremely well with local builders and home remodeling companies.
Technical On-Page SEO
Have you ever visited a web page and it wouldn't load? You probably clicked back and went to the next search result without much thinking. Google sees this type of behavior and views it as a sign of being unreliable. It's more important than ever to make sure that your webpage is loading fast and reliably.
As of last year, Google has stated that the loading speed of all your web pages is a factor that they take into account when ranking your site.
Here are some of the simple things you can do to control your page feed on your site:
As talked about above, images are incredibly important for home builders, but before uploading these images to your site make sure that they are as clear as possible while also maintaining a small image file. You can do this by compressing your images on websites like () or ().
Once you’ve finished compressing your images, now you can upload them to your website and then make sure to fill out the alt text.
You can find the section for alt text on most CMS( Content Management Systems) like Squarespace or in WordPress. You want to make sure the alt text is unique, but they can focus on groups of images.
For example, including bathroom remodel in all of your pictures on the bathroom remodeling page shows a positive sign to google that you are invested in providing your clients with images they want to see!
Site Speed
As far as other options to control site speed, most common website Builders like Wix and Squarespace will have optimized speeds built into their premade site templates making it easier for most business owners. But because of the simplicity on their end, there isn't much control you have on your scores other than keeping those image and video files as small as possible.
Interested in seeing your speed score? Use (GTMetrix)
On sites built with WordPress, the process is a little different. We can use plugins like () to improve page speeds by minimizing coding on the back end and images at the same time. While some of these plugins can be simple, these techniques can become advanced pretty quickly, so if you don't feel comfortable, we recommend looking for a developer to help you or searching on youtube for that exact plugin.
Pro Tip:
Use this plugin to make a copy and back up your site before making any changes that could possibly break your site.
Page Content
It's important to build your pages for Google's algorithm and for the users that are going to read your pages. The most important elements for Google to determine on page relevancy to increase your rankings are going to be the title tag and the H1 tag.
When first optimizing your SEO on your site, take a look at what your competition is doing well. Most businesses have a good idea of another local competitor that is crushing it with their website and learn what they are offering and what keywords they are using on their pages.
Create a list of competitors and plug their site into a website or software like() to find their top pages and keywords. This is called keyword research and is essential to finding our largest pool of clients.
Most sites and software have a competition metric as well, which shows how competitive it is to rank highly for that exact term. New sites are probably best going after these lowest competition keywords until you start seeing consistent traffic and clients. We want google to know we are reliable on the smaller keywords first before we go after the established businesses.
The key to success and SEO is small consistent wins.
Repeat this process and gather key words for each page and service that you will provide on your website and plug these into the URL, Heading Tag and the Title Tag. Aside from that, the rest of the content should stay on topic while entertaining and providing your readers with content that is relevant and answers to questions that they may have about your services.
Internal Linking
A connected website is a more efficient website, so make sure that your content is leading readers to other pages that they may find relevant. We do this by providing anchor text which is these blue highlighted text that you find across the internet. Usually, these anchors bring you to a different site or another page on a site that is relevant to something you're looking for.
Not only is this text beneficial to the user, but Google also uses anchor text as a way to clarify and ensure what a page is about. Use this as a guide for google to enhance the clarity of what’s on a page even further.
For example, when writing on your home remodeling service page make sure to include a link to your bathroom remodeling page with an anchor text like “bathroom remodeling”.
When doing this effectively and implementing this strategy on the majority of pages on a site, we usually see ranking improvements that rival building backlinks. This strategy is incredibly efficient and also something that can change your site and see the results with today.
Local SEO
You want to make sure you're reaching clients in your local area, so make sure to include the cities and locations that you are trying to reach in your keyword research. This means including the city name inside of your title tags and heading tags.
This also means being as consistent as possible with addresses and registering your business on as many legitimate directories and social sites with backlinks so that Google is confident in showing your business to local searchers.
Google My Business
One of the best ways to reinforce this is with Google my business. Google my business is almost like a social media platform for business owners that google provides for people to show off their business and services to the community.
This profile allows you to post and interact with people in the community while also acting as a way to receive feedback and be active.
Google my business also plays a factor and local searches like the one you'll see below where a map is provided to customers along with business names and reviews.
Leveraging this platform will allow you to appear higher in these search results and ensure that eyes are being directed to your website.
Questions to Ask to SEO Agency
