Search engine optimization can be a tricky process for any business, let alone home builders. As someone who is in the construction business you probably have limited or no knowledge of SEO and how it works. Most construction companies that I know have hired other companies to handle their SEO and marketing or are not even aware of how they should go about improving their SEO situation. As a home builder, your priority is building beautiful homes and satisfying your customers. But if you don’t expand your customer base, your business will not grow the way it should.
Having a website is one of the modern ways businesses are growing their customer base but having a website alone will not be enough. To make sure your website can actually be found by your target audience it must be optimised for search engines such as Google. That is where SEO comes in, to help you maximize your website traffic and get all the potential clients looking to purchase customized homes. Here we discuss ways construction companies optimize their websites for search engines and rank higher among the search results.
By optimizing important on-page components
As a homebuilder each of your site’s pages should be individually optimised. Experts at Team-X, a web design services Australia company say that by changing and improving specific components on your pages you can drastically increase your chances of getting ranked for your target keywords. Here are some of the important elements that you should be aware of.
Page title
Page titles can be pretty significant especially since they are the first thing you see when you search for something on Google. These are the big blue links that appear when you search on Google and Google reads them to determine what your page is about. Your goal should be to make your page titles as relevant to your page content, as this increases your chances of getting found.
Your URL
Page URLs are also very important as they help Google find out what your page is about. As a construction company you want to have page URLs that are SEO-friendly and findable by people looking for homes. Let’s say you build houses in Sydney’s suburb Alexandria and have a page for it on your website. A good title for this page would be something like “www.homebuilder.com/new-homes-alexandria-sydney-australia”.
H1 tag
The H1 tag is basically the header on a page and it’s another important thing Google looks at when figuring out what a page is about. A good header should match the URL and the title of the page to make it easier for searchers to find your page.
The text on your page
Your body text must include your target keyword phrase. However, you should avoid stuffing your keyword multiple times in your text. You must use your keyword in a way that looks natural.
Meta description
The meta description is the text that appears under the search results and their URLs. Your meta description should be catchy and it should also contain your keyword or a variation of it.
Off-page SEO for homebuilders
All the activities done outside your website to improve your ranking are called off-page SEO. Here are two very effective off-page SEO methods that you can use for your construction company.
Building backlinks
Homebuilders usually have a lot of connections that include material suppliers, vendors, contractors, realtors and so on. These connections and relationships can be used to as an opportunity to increase the number of links pointing to your website and boost your visibility. Make sure to get a backlink from any website that you have a relationship with.
Getting reviews
Getting online reviews is one of the most impactful off-page SEO techniques that can be used to benefit your construction company. You can ask your happy customers to leave you positive reviews on sites such as Google or Houzz.
Construction company keyword research and optimisation
One of the most important steps in getting a construction company’s website ranked is choosing the right keywords. This can be a time-consuming process and requires extensive research and will help you find out what your customers are searching for and what keywords and phrases you should optimize your website for. You should start by finding a number of related keywords, identify their search volume, find out how hard it would be to rank for them and lastly choose the ones that have a good search volume but are not too difficult to rank for.
Useful SERP features
As a construction company, you can use SERP features such as the Local Pack, Knowledge Panel, Image Pack and People Also Ask as opportunities to show up on Google and be seen more by customers that are looking to build houses.
The Local Pack
This box contains the 3 most relevant locations related to the search term and gives your construction business a chance to get featured. You should optimize your Google My Business Profile to take advantage of this feature.
The Knowledge Panel
The Knowledge Panel (aka Knowledge Graph) is an information box that appears on Google when you search for something that’s in the Knowledge Graph. These panels give you brief information on a topic based on available content.
The Image Pack
This is the horizontal row of images that appears for searches where Google decides visual content is helpful. To increase your chances of appearing in the image pack make sure your images are optimized and they have descriptive file information. Make sure you have good pictures from the houses you have built so that people can see your work quality.
People Also Ask
This is a set of questions that Google displays when it believes they’re related to your search. Each of the questions has the ability to be expanded and looks like a featured snippet. To increase your chances of getting featured in this section you can use FAQs on your website to answer questions that people looking for homes might have.
