Local SEO Tips for General Contractors

---

With the rise in the online community, it is pertinent to build your business presence online. To participate in this online community and stand out from the crowd, you need to take some fundamental SEO techniques.

Local SEO helps local customers find you when they enter a related search query and see your business details on the top of the SERPs. Therefore, investing time and money in local SEO can help you rely on local customers.

12 Local SEO Tips for General Contractors

---

1. Getting Verified on Google My Business

Google My Business has made it super easy for anyone and everyone to get found on the internet. It costs you nothing. Yes, you read that right. Creating a profile on Google My Business is free.

All you need to do is get verified as a business on Google. You can provide information that the bots need to track you online, from your business name, location, industry, reviews, etc. So, help the bots, and they will help you increase traffic. 

Steps Towards Your Journey Of Google My Business:

• Create and verify a Google my Business page as soon as possible.
• Post images and text using Google Posts within your account using the “Create” and “Add” option. This will increase actions on your listing quickly by a factor of 10x. 

• Seek authentic and genuine reviews from your customers. 

Read: Step-by-step Setup Guide for Google My Business Set up

2. Adding a Map to Your Location

Helping bots is one thing, but you are there to provide value to humans. So, the bots prefer businesses that offer value to the customers in the easiest way possible. 

Therefore, when you add a map to your location, it signals to the bots that you are clearing the path for potential customers. 

Besides, it is essential to have consistency in your business's name, Address, Phone number, and location. Use local citation tools like Mozlocal, Brightlocal, etc., to know how accurate are your NAP details and fix the inaccurate details on shown sites. 

This helps customers reach your store and avail of your services effectively. 

Moreover, You Can Add The Following Information Too:

• Opening and closing hours to ease the traffic.
• Valuable landmarks to help customers.
• A phone call link for contacting you directly on mobile phones.
• Social Media links to help customers share your services with other potential customers. 

Now you know why having a map on your website is one of the wisest decisions for local SEO.

3. Managing your Reviews

Reviews are the mouthpieces for your brand. They can have more impact on your potential customers than anything you would ever say about yourself. 

So, make sure you have reviews in your favor to attract more customers.

Tips To Get Reviews:

• Send an email requesting a review as soon as someone avails of your services. You can generate a review form or link in your GMB profile.

• Ask them to add the target keyword in your review if feasible. 
• Always respond warmly to your reviews by adding your business name and location in the comment. For example, “We are grateful for your feedback on [product/service] in [city,state]. We highly appreciate your time and effort and look forward to serving you again. Thank you from the [full company name] team."

Read: 10 Tips to Get Local Reviews for Your Business

4. Making Your Site Mobile Responsive

Google Search central has laid down specific measures to keep in mind while designing a website. Responsive design means that the website's content responds to the device's size on which it is operated. 

When even kids have mobile phones, it is pertinent to design mobile responsive websites, i.e., the content of your website looks pleasing on any device. 

Therefore, making your site mobile-friendly is one of the best decisions for your online business. Either design a mobile-friendly website or modify your existing website using quick tools. 

Tools You Can Use:

• Mobile-Friendly Test by Google Search Console would help you know how easily a visitor can use your page on a mobile device. Here’s an example tested to see if a site is mobile-friendly. 

• Bootstrap is a free tool that allows you to make a mobile responsive website. 
• FitText is another helpful software that helps make your website's font-sizes flexible. 

Pro Tip: Always optimize the media used on the website. This will help in the page loading speed and the overall outlook of your website. 

5. Building Voice Search Optimized Content

Who doesn't like to get results to their search query without having to type/read it all? 

Google Reports show that 27% of the global online population uses voice search on mobile. This is enough to substantiate that voice search is leading online businesses. 

Today, if you can make voice search optimized content, then there is no way anyone can pull you down on the internet. Therefore, you need to think about what your customer can ask as a search query and form the content answering that question. 

Other Valuable Tips To Make Voice Search-Friendly Content:

• Writing content in a conversational tone so that when a human hears it, they find it relatable and understandable. 
• Opting for bullet points or step guides for ranking on voice search.
• Hitting the right chord by analyzing the tone and nature of your potential customer. 
• Placing relevant key phrases in your content sends positive signals to web crawlers.
• Building relevant FAQs to attract customers.

Tools To Find Key Phrases:

• Ahrefs keyword tool is a free tool that gives you thousands of relevant keyword ideas in seconds.

Here’s a screenshot example of how it offers keyword ideas for the word “backpacks”

• Semrush is a paid tool that provides valuable keywords for any business. 
• Google Keyword Planner is a free tool used by all businesses to get the local short tail and long-tail keywords. 

6. Leveraging Advertisement

Ranking on SERPs can be done organically as well as through paid advertisements. You are there to provide services and reach a larger audience; you need solid tactics. 

Types of advertising for general contractors:

• PPC Advertising: Get google AdSense, select a plan, and run campaigns to advertise your services locally. It helps you secure the top position on SERP, even before the organic results.

• Facebook Advertising: Advertising through social media is one of the most effective ways to grab the attention of your audience/customer base.
• LinkedIn Advertising: Big brands and millions of people use this platform for advertising their events or sharing their experiences. 

Leverage such platforms and place your ads wherever you can to gain the most from your online presence.

7. Facilitating Link Building and Community Engagement

The best way to grow in any field is by building community for yourself. It could be the support you gain on the way to progress and the people working in the same industry as you. 

You are a general contractor, link to others like you, and build a community that supports you no matter what. 

You can leverage this community by asking the members to link to your website, which will help you acquire quality backlinks and send strong signals to Google. 

Furthermore, you will establish authority by seeking support from those who have already built authority in the industry. By looking for resource pages or guest posts on other contractor blogs, you can do it. 

Tools for Link Building:

• Hunter.io helps you find relevant links to make your site authoritative.
• Ninja Outreach is one of the favorite tools for digital marketers and small businesses interested in growing their presence online.
• Buzzstream is an outreach tool and prospect manager. 

8. Hopping onto the Social Media

Social media platforms reign the internet today. To grab potential customers' attention, you need to make a strong presence on platforms your customers enjoy using/spending most of their time on. 

According to Statista, by 2025, there will be a tremendous rise in social media usage. In 2020, over 3.6 billion people were using social media worldwide, projected to increase to almost 4.41 billion in 2025. 

Therefore, grabbing the audience's attention on social media is the need of the hour for all businesses. 

Expand your online presence by engaging with your audience using various features such as reels, photos, videos, stories, etc. 

Platforms you can use-

• Meta for business is attracting traction from all over the world. It has numerous features that set it apart and value the customer and service providers. 
• Instagram is a part of the Meta world. It is an image-focused platform, perfect for making people aware of your brand image and personality. Most businesses and people are fascinated to explore content regarding contractors, as in the screenshot. 

• Twitter is a preferred platform for all businesses as it has an active user base that likes to engage with short-form content.

9. Optimizing On-Page SEO

When it comes to on-page SEO, it is primarily about writing and placing content on the website so that it is crawlable by the bots and convenient for the users. Therefore, proper HTML formatting and other SEO techniques give your visitors a soothing user experience. 

Tips for On-page SEO:

• Use heading tags appropriately as they help readers and crawlers track your content.
• Update URLs, page titles, and meta descriptions when you change/update the page's content. 

You can use the free Mozbar tool to check if the page passes on-page best practices; if not, optimize accordingly. 

• Avoid keyword stuffing.
• Use pillar pages for clubbing the content and making it easier for the readers and crawlers to locate your content. 

Tools To Use:

• CoSchedule is a leading tool to optimize title tags.
• On-Page Grader Tool is an efficient tool to analyze the on-page SEO.

Read: Local SEO: On-Page Strategies for Success

10. Increasing Page-Loading Speed

It is essential to ensure that your page loads at the speed of light. 

After all, no one likes to stop at a site for more than 5-10 seconds in this fast-moving world. Thus, our contractor site should load within seconds. Studies show that users feel stress-free and in control when the site loads in one second. Take a look at the below screenshot. 

A contractor’s website takes 15s to load, which will annoy the users. Hence, users and search engines give the least value to sites that take more than 3s to load. 

Tips To Decrease Page Load Time: 

• Work on the images you use on your website; image optimization helps a lot. 
• Reduce your redirects to make the most of the visitor's time. 
• Eliminate unnecessary plugins that may hamper your page loading speed. 

11. Conducting Regular Competitor Analysis

Not saying to check out the competitor's site every second of the day. But it is essential to note what is working for your competitor and what isn't. 

From riding on their success tricks to learning from their mistakes, that is what a great competitor analysis helps you achieve. 

Tips to follow while doing a competitor analysis:

• Look at their most ranking keywords. You can find it using SEO tools like SEMrush, Ahrefs, and others that show top-ranking keywords. 

• Build content from where they end. Don't copy their content; learn from it and develop better content/services.
• Analyze their backlinks and build organic connections with the people your competitor is connected to. 

12. Performing a Local SEO Audit

Putting everything in place and not analyzing anything is like setting up a company without any measure for supervision. 

This is why an SEO audit comes into play. SEO is an ongoing and intuitive process; you need to perform local SEO audits regularly to see where your site stands and where it needs improvement. 

Tools for SEO Audit:

• Google Search Console Audit- See if your site is crawlable and fix any errors that would hinder indexing. Fix these issues to be crawled by search engines to appear on SERP. 

• Screaming Frog SEO is a fast and advanced SEO site audit tool. 
• Deep crawl offers a complete end-to-end technical SEO platform with numerous tools. 
• Semrush Site Audit helps fix technical issues in no time. 

Local SEO for General Contractors- FAQs

---

Q1: How Is Local SEO Different From SEO?

Local SEO focuses on local search queries, thus driving only the local traffic to your site/store. In contrast, SEO works for the site's overall visibility on a national or global level. 

Q2: What Does Local SEO For General Contractors Include?

Contractors optimize their site using relevant keywords for local searches to attract potential customers using various tools and research. 

Q3: How Can A Contractor Use SEO Promote Services?

3 Proven ways to promote your services:

• By improving reviews
• By running ad campaigns
• By providing valuable blog content, answer customers' questions. 

Q4: Is Local SEO Difficult? 

You have to put SEO basics in place, and you are good to go. However, if you are still skeptical of your abilities, then look for any freelancer or agency with relevant experience in this field. 

Key Takeaways

---

1. Optimize for Google My Business and get your business verified on Google. 

2. Build Voice Search Optimized Content by working on the search intent of the content.

3. Manage your reviews by pinning the most positive feedback but never neglecting a negative one. 

4. Make Your Site Responsive to let your business reach as many people as possible.

5. Add a consistent location on the Map to your store for better traction.

6. Leverage Advertising to grab the attention of the audience.

7. Facilitate Link Building by networking with people of the same industry

8. Try new Social Media trends and interact with the audience.

9. Optimize On-Page SEO by taking care of minute details of the page.

10. Increase page loading time by posting only the relevant things on your website. 

11. Conduct competitor analysis and learn from their ups and downs.

12. Perform local SEO audits regularly and update the site as and when needed.