Step By Step Easy Implantation SEO Guideline For Contractors
First Of All, What Is SEO and Why Does Its Thing To Contractors?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the art of optimizing your website so that it is found on search engine results pages from your customers who are prepared to employ you for service.
For example, it’s the way you get your website found on a search engine such as Google by people in the city, that are ready to purchase your services now, or sometime later on.
The ultimate purpose is to get your website at the top of the very first page of search results for key terms that you would like your site to appear for.
➦ How and When Do You Begin Seeing Results?
It takes a few weeks until you start to see SEO and being found in search engines kick in.
You need to start with a few best practices and implementing a few changes to your website. You can go down a rabbit hole of tactics and strategies to help your website climb the rankings of Google, but the goal of the resource here is to give you a few quick wins.
5 SEO Strategies For Contractors Websites
1. Update Your Page Title and Meta Descriptions
- Updating your Page Titles and Meta Descriptions are one of the fastest wins you’ll have when it comes to SEO. But before we get into upgrading your titles and meta descriptions, let’s dive into what these things are.
- The page title is the clickable headline that you see on a SERP. Your page title is very important for SEO because it helps search engines know what your website is all about, which can help you rank for important key terms.
- As significant is how the page title is often the first impression a possible searcher sees when locating your business listed on search engines.
- The Meta Description is the summary/description that is located beneath the page title on the SERP. While the keywords used in your meta description don’t directly impact your search engine ranking, a fantastic description can encourage searchers to click through to your website. And, after all, that’s what you are after — folks visiting your website!
Let’s look at just how Mil-SPEC’s page title and meta description in their homepage is written:
- Among the first things we notice that the page title and meta tag description aren’t optimized for those who don’t know who they are.
- Sure, if someone is looking for MIL-SPEC Landscaping, they will locate MIL-SPEC around Google. But what about the people who aren’t acquainted with their brand? What about people looking for “Landscaping services in Clarksville Tennessee.” This is where you can use your title and description to convey with those searchers not acquainted with your brand.
- Pro Tip: When crafting your title and meta tag description, use a free tool such as this SERP Preview Tool. This tool will show you the way your title and description will appear on search engines or you should hire one of the best professionals for SEO for Contractors business.
▹ How To Update Your Title and Description
- How you update your page titles and descriptions will vary by what site platform you’re using. Luckily, regardless of what platform you use, it should be quite straightforward. We have included links for the main DIY website builders below:
Wix: Adding SEO Page Titles and Descriptions (Meta Tags)
Weebly: Establishing Your Name Tags and Meta Description Best Practices
Squarespace: Adding page and site descriptions for SEO
- If you are not using one of the above platforms, talk to your web developer and they’ll be able to help you out!
2. Review Your Website Content
- Written copy on your website is the key way it’s possible to communicate with search engines what your business is all about.
- All the content on your website should be unique to your enterprise and correctly showcase your voice and brand, but since you think about writing compelling website copy you also need to be aware that you’re going to want to incorporate words that talk about your services and service location(s).
- Before we look at an example from MIL-SPEC an important disclaimer: avoid keyword stuffing.
- Just because we state wants to include keywords in your website copy does not imply we should be seeking to include as many keywords as possible.
- Keyword stuffing never comes across organic which hurts your brand and also the chance to collect leads from site visitors and, in some cases, keyword stuffing can cause a Google penalty.
- With MIL-SPEC we want to target terms like “landscaping services” and include their location, Clarksville, Tennessee. So keeping those phrases in mind, the fact that we would like to avoid keyword stuffing, and that we would like to correctly represent MIL-SPEC’s voice, tone, and brand, what upgrades can we create?
▹ Our Recommendation Is To Change This Sentence:
- Call us, email us, text us, and join our adventures on social media.
- Additionally, a great best practice is to include your contact information in the footer throughout your website. There are a few benefits here.
- On the SEO side, this provides good context to search engines about where you are. On the user experience side, it gives website visitors what they expect regarding where they can find a contact place.
Your Action Item: Inspection your website content. If you feel there are places in which you aren’t communicating your location and services, add a comment to your web copy.
3. Update Image Alt Text
- While Google is becoming pretty good at knowing what is on a page, it cannot “read” the content of an image without a bit of help.
- The image alt text is used to refer to a picture on a webpage and can help search engines properly index a picture.
- When we looked at MIL-SPEC’s website, we found A good deal of the pictures had alt text that simply said “picture.” A simple fix here would be to give these images a much more descriptive alt text.
Your Action Item: Update alt image tags with good descriptions of each photo. You would like your alt text to be descriptive, but not contain any spammy attempts at keyword stuffing.
4. Claim Your Google My Business Listing
- If we would like to work effectively and effectively in your SEO efforts, we need to know what will have the largest effect.
- Luckily, every year, Moz publishes their local search engine ranking variables -what factors affect how local businesses (such as contractors) are found on Google.
- Both the 2017 and 2018 reports highlight the importance of claiming your Google My Business Page (GMB). In reality, the 2018 report highlights Google My Business Signs as the most essential factor to rank from the Google Local Pack and also the fourth most important signal for localized organic rankings.
Your Action Item: When you have not already claimed your Google My Business profile, then be sure that you do! Not certain where to start? We’ve got a handy resource on Jobber Academy that will walk you step-by-step through the procedure.
5. Build Citations
- What is a Local Citation? A local citation is any mention of your business online. These sites usually include your organization name, address, and telephone number, which are often known as NAP (title, address, telephone). Citations may also include other information including your zip code, state, and website.
- Citations can be categorized in one of two manners: Unstructured and Formatted Citations.
- Structured citations are listings on business directories. These include listings on sites like Yelp, Yellow Pages, and Angie’s List.
- Unstructured citations are mentions of the business on sites that are not business listings. Examples can include online media stories or reviews, blog posts, and much more.
Your Action Item: Get started by building structured citations in places which you aren’t recorded. Searching for the best places? Whitespark includes a listing of the best citations for contractors. Head to that link, pick your state, and you’ll see the list of where to concentrate your citation building attempts.
Getting Started
Search engine optimization can appear daunting at first and we hope this source has helped demystify the world of SEO.
Start by following the 80/20 rule when getting started and implement the advice we’ve listed above. And once you’ve implemented these modifications or you hire professional SEO services providers like XtremeUX Digital, then you can feel comfortable researching other SEO strategies, tactics, and guidance.
