Long gone are the days of flicking through the Yellow Pages to find a company. Now, there are two main options for contractors looking to find new business. First, you’ve got recommendations from friends and family. These are easy enough to achieve; do a good job, and your happy clients may recommend your company to others. The second, and more common option today, however, is featuring your business on the first page of Google. As a specialist SEO company for contractors, trust us, if done correctly, you will prosper from this!
These days, it’s not good enough to just have a website. Each and every page must be optimised if you want to appear visible to future clients. Think about it, when you go to buy something, how often do you click on the second page of results? Not very often, right? If you want clients to find you, you must appear on the first page of results. But how do you do this? For a start, you’ll need a comprehensive SEO strategy.
What is SEO?
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the process of modifying your website to make it more favourable to Google’s algorithm. Essentially, it’s what makes your business rank for different keywords and phrases on Google’s Search Engine Results Page (SERP). The more boxes you tick, the higher you rank when people search for phrases related to you, and vice versa. This means greater visibility, more website traffic, and ultimately, more enquiries and sales. SEO is something that all businesses should be engaging in – contractors included!
How Does SEO Work?
Take this blog as an example. Chances are, you’re reading it because you’re looking for help from an SEO company for contractors like VerriBerri. This is because the Google algorithm prioritises user experience above all else. It wants to ensure you can find the information that you’re looking for with as little effort as possible. After all, millions of new websites are published every day, many of which are filled with spam and irrelevant content. Without an algorithm, you’d be spending hours on end scrolling through page after page of results to find your information.
When any content on your website is published, Google’s algorithm will determine its ranking through a process called indexing. Here, Google will send out bots known as ‘crawlers’ to scan your website. Crawlers determine how many of the criteria laid out by the algorithm your website satisfies. Unfortunately, however, Google doesn’t like to share what these criteria are, nor how many of them they are. As you’d expect, keeping on top of this can feel like a full-time job in and of itself. SEO isn’t something that should be taken lightly, so if you’re struggling with it, get in touch!
Three Categories of SEO
The process of optimising your website is incredibly complex, not to mention time-consuming! There are so many different elements to consider, and many of them don’t just involve the content you put out. SEO is broken down into three main categories; on-page SEO, off-page SEO, and technical SEO.
On-Site SEO
On-site SEO refers to any optimisation activities which take place directly on your website. Alongside creating optimised blog content, this also includes back-end factors such as alt tags, meta descriptions, and more. These factors are crucial if you want search engines to find and promote your content. To ensure its optimised, however, one of the first things you need to be doing is keyword research. This helps you to determine the most searched for words and phrases relevant to your business.
Essentially, keywords are a word or phrase that someone may search for when looking for a product or service you provide. In this blog, for example, our keyword is ‘SEO company for contractors.’ They help Google to determine what the information you’re providing is about, so to better place it in the algorithm. This means when keywords relevant to content on your website are searched, Google is more likely to recommend your content. Keywords should be featured regularly throughout your content, as well as in the first and last paragraphs. Other ways in which you can optimise your content include:
- Keeping sentence lengths to below 20 words.
- Including both inbound and outbound links.
- Ensuring your content is of the optimal length.
- Incorporating imagery relevant to the post.
Off-site SEO
Off-site strategies, on the other hand, include things that boost your website ranking but don’t directly involve adapting your website. It’s an entirely separate process to on-site SEO, but no less important for driving traffic to your site. The biggest component of off-site SEO are backlinks.
Backlinks occur when external websites include a direct link to your website. Publications use backlinks to support their own content with further information their readers may be interested in. Provided that your backlinks come from a reputable source, they are great at boosting your SEO value. It signals that high-quality websites trust your information, and if they’re happy to promote you, so are Google!
Technical SEO
Technical SEO focuses on the more intricate components of your website such as page speed, URLs, site navigation, and more. The aim of this is to ensure your website is ‘crawler friendly.’ Even if every other aspect of your website is perfect, is Google can’t crawl through it, it’s a wasted effort.
Technical SEO isn’t just important for pleasing the algorithm, however. It also ties heavily with boosting user experience – something which Google considers to be of the upmost importance. If your website is taking ages to load, or is tricky to navigate, many people will simply just click off. This can significantly reduce the conversion rate of what little traffic you do achieve with a poorly optimised website.
Contact our SEO Company for Contractors
With SEO, there is little room for error. Your site’s health is so fragile, and even the smallest mistake can send it plummeting down the SERP. Unless you know exactly what you’re doing, it’s probably best to contact a specialist SEO company for contractors like VerriBerri. To reach our team directly, call us today on 01376 386 860 or simply click here!