If you’re looking for a way to increase traffic to your contractor business, you are in the right place. Now, let’s take a look at these SEO tips for contractors.

Here are some tips you will learn in this post:

1. Create Content Around Strategic Keywords
2. Create Meaningful Content To Engage Prospective Clients
3. Write Compelling Meta Descriptions
4. Decrease Page Load Speed
5. Link to Relevant Sites with Similar Content
6. Get More Backlinks (Inbound Links)
7. Keep URLs Short and Meaningful
8. Keyword Your Images
9. Be Sure Your Website Theme is SEO Optimized
10.  Pillar Content
11.  Add Rich Content To Your Page
12.  Responsive Design

Sit Back, Relax, and Learn How to Build Your SEO!

Create Content Around Strategic Keywords

In the title of this page, you can find our keyword “SEO Tips” and “ for contractors.” 

Do some keyword research and find what people are looking for. 

When choosing a keyword, pay attention to the number of monthly searches for that term. Nobody wants to write a thousand-word blog for a term that only gets searched ten times each month. 

Find a term with a few hundred or a few thousand searches a month. 

SEO Tip: Practice doing keyword research to see what your audience is searching. Try some of the techniques below. 

•  Google’s Auto-Suggest: Check out Google’s auto-suggestions (These are based on what is searched most)
  
  
• Amazon Book Titles:
  Look at the top-selling book titles on Amazon and see what keywords authors have chosen. 

The best selling book titles have been carefully chosen to attract keyword traffic. 

You can also see what auto-populates in the amazon search bar just like you did on Google. 

• Wikipedia Related Terms:

Pull up a Wikipedia article that covers the topic and look to see what other keywords Wikipedia links to on the top of the article. 

Just look for the blue underlined keywords. All of the blue terms on the page are related keywords your audience may be searching.

• Answer The Public Tool: Go to answerthepublic.com and search a term you think people are interested in. 

This website will give you other similar keywords that are searched for. 

When searching “contractor” on answer the public, you end up with the picture below. 

Create Meaningful Content To Engage Prospective Clients

After finding the right keyword, do a Google search for the keyword and see what comes up. 

Google’s search algorithm knows what people want when they search for any specific keyword. Look at the search results and see what’s there.

 If you see an article that is titled “contractor vs. subcontractor”, you’re on the right track. 

To rank your article as #1, start by creating a better piece of content than what’s currently ranking well. 

Example: Your title might be something like, “What Does A General Contractor Do?”  Remember to have your article revolve around the keywords you want to rank for. 

SEO Tip: Find a keyword that your audience is searching for and write an article that addresses that term.

Write Compelling Meta Descriptions

Be sure you write meta tags for all of your website pages. A meta tag is the 150 character description that search engines will show about your webpage. 

If you don’t write a meta tag, Google will use the first 150 characters of your webpage by default and this isn’t always good. 

Be sure you have your main keywords in the meta tag at least once. 

If you’re not sure what to include in your meta tag, you can use your main header titles for inspiration as they usually get to the heart of your article and include your keywords. 

SEO Tip: Take a few minutes and write a high-quality meta description for each page on your website. Include your main keyword in the description. 

The image above shows you three examples of a meta description from our own website. 

Decrease Page Load Speed

How quickly your page loads is becoming increasingly more important as time goes on. 

It’s imperative that your page takes no longer than 3 seconds to load. 

If your page takes longer than three seconds to load, your article probably will not make it to the first page of Google.

SEO Tip: Check out https://gtmetrix.com to check how quickly your page loads. Just enter in your website and let it do the rest. 

Link to relevant sites with similar content

Google looks to see if your web-pages have links to high-quality websites.

Letting your readers know about other high-quality content and then giving them links to that content will help increase your organic ranking in search engines. When you do this, you get a boost in the search engines. 

Be careful though, if you link to low-quality sites or sites that aren’t maintained well, you will actually be penalized in the search engines. 

SEO Tip: Add three to five links out to other authoritative sites and articles. 

Get More Backlinks (Inbound Links)

Getting people to link to your site is an important factor when getting that number one spot on the Google search results. However, it’s also equally as important to understand who is linking back to your website. Google will check your website to see the following:

• Google will want to see if the site linking to you is authoritative.
• Google will check to see if the site and its content are related to your page.
• Google will look at how quickly you build your links. (Building links slow and steadily often ranks better than getting a bunch at once.) 
• Google looks for spammy links. (Don’t pay some shady website to get you 5,000 backlinks for $5. Google will penalize your site for this type of behavior).

The easiest way to get high-quality backlinks is to increase your outbound links to other authoritative sites.

It’s a little like following someone on Twitter. When you follow them, there is a decent chance they will follow you back. 

When you praise other contractors or their books or articles, let them know about what you are telling people and ask them to link to your page from their website. 

This is a win-win- strategy for increasing your SEO ranking. 

Keep URLs short and meaningful

Try to avoid having long, randomly generated URL slugs. 

Example: If your page is about healthy thinking then your URL should look something like this: www.yoursitename/contractor-hiring-tips.com.  

Lastly, keep your page URL as short as you can. Short URLs rank better in Google so don’t include your entire page title like “10-secret-healthy-thinking-strategies-for-stressful-times”.  Here are two examples. 

SEO Tip: Avoid having long, randomly generated URL slugs.

Be sure your website theme is SEO optimized

If your website is built on a platform that has theme options (like WordPress), be sure you purchase a theme that specifically says “Optimized for SEO.” 

Themes that are optimized for SEO will be more clean and simple in a number of ways. This helps to keep your page load time very low. 

This means you will have a competitive advantage over the majority of similar websites whose themes are not optimized for SEO. 

The faster a webpage loads, the better Google will treat you in the search engine results so be sure to choose a theme that is SEO optimized. 

Pillar content

A piece of pillar content is a large piece of content like an “Ultimate Guide”. 

Creating a piece of pillar content and then linking your other articles into this long form article will help to increase your search engine rankings. 

Not only this but if the article is high quality, you can request readers to submit their email to view the whole page. 

This will increase your email list which you can use to pull past website viewers back to your content. 

Add Rich Content To Your Page

Webpages with rich content rank better in Google. Rich content is something that viewers can interact with. This means your page isn’t just a big block of text. 

Rich content can be a calendar your clients can book a meeting with. It may be an e-commerce product such as a book you sell or a chatbox for prospective shoppers to speak with you through. The most common rich content is video content.

Create a blog post with a short video that encapsulates the message of your blog post. 

The video shouldn’t be more than 2 minutes because the majority of viewers will stop watching after two minutes. 

Including a video will help boost your search engine ranking, increase the time users spend on your page, and will also help to build trust with your viewers as they get to know you.

 This can lead to winning more clients in the long run.  

SEO Tip: Add something interactive to your page. See the calendar in the image below. 

Responsive Design

A website with a responsive design means that the webpages in your site will automatically resize themselves depending on the screen size of the device loading your page. 

Google rewards websites that effectively fit the screens of viewers.

If you are creating your website from a WordPress Theme, be sure the theme includes responsive design like the theme shown below.

Seo Tip: Make sure your website fits all screen sizes.

Final Tips For My Contractor Friends 

Overall SEO is a cruel mistress when it comes to understanding what works. It’s slow and often unforgiving. But after you have a full understanding of how to create meaningful content, optimize, publish, and link – you’ll soon see the greatest results of all:

More organic traffic!

You’ll finally see people heading to your website to contract you out for jobs, and you won’t have paid a dime for that lead. You’ll get more and more traffic the more and more you optimize! 

We hope you will use these SEO tips and keep learning more about contractor marketing with these resources here!

Contractor Marketing Simplified

9 Unbeatable Marketing Strategies for Contractors [Checklist 2024]

The Ultimate Guide to Local SEO: 33 Tips and Strategies [Update 2024]

Lead Generation Marketing: The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide To Increase Your Profit [Update 2024]