CONTRACTOR SEO
Search Engine Optimization for Contractors
Start getting more of the projects you want.
YOUR CONTRACTOR SEO PARTNER
In our industry, these qualities are very hard to find, and they matter.
Complete Transparency
Know exactly what you’re paying for, and exactly what we’re doing at all times. We’ll never leave you in the dark, or hide behind sales jargon.
One Client Per Market
We will never work with multiple contractors in the same area. As long as you’re with us, we’ll never work with your competitors, period.
Proven Strategy
We’re veterans in both the internet marketing world and the construction industry. You’ll quickly see why our clients dominate on the web.
Unmatched Support & Service
Customer service is extremely important to us. Work directly with an actual marketer, not a sales person. We’re here for your questions.
THE IMPORTANCE OF CONTRACTOR SEO
When was the last time you looked in a phone book?
Today, over 80% of us grab our phones and search on Google instead.
SEO is what helps your contracting business appear in search results, giving you the best chance of attracting new clients.
How Are Ranking Decisions Made?
This is a complicated question to answer, but to make it simple, search engines have algorithms that measure the quality of websites based. They are measured on thousands of factors. A search engine is only effective when it provides quality results, so they work hard to ensure only the best results make it to the top of the list.
Cracking The Top Three Spots
The top 3 organic results (the listings that appear under advertisements or local listings) are one of the most coveted places to be. Those top 3 spots account for over 50% of the clicks on any given search. This means, if you are in one of the top 3 spots, people searching are much more likely to visit your website.
Boosting Credibility And Authority
The Internet has drastically changed what the sales process looks like for many contractors. That’s because today, consumers have access to a wealth of helpful resources that can help them learn about their options before they speak with you. Valuable content builds trust and credibility with potential customers early in the research phase.
Would you hire the second-best contractor? Probably not.
The same goes for hiring a law firm SEO agency.
CONTRACTOR SEO ISN'T MAGIC, IT'S STRATEGY
Here's What It Really Takes To Get Found In Local Search
Google My Business Optimization
Google Maps can be tricky. A great Google Listing will help potential clients find your contracting business more easily online. We’ve spent years studying all of the little things that go into an epic Google Listing. Through experience, we’ve also identified things that don’t help or even harm your Google Listing. If you want to ensure your business shows up in Google’s Map 3-Pack, we’d love to help!
Citation Audit & Building
Your contracting business should have one, consistent online identity. It’s easy to create a mess, through business re-locations, phone number changes, and normal growth. But, if you want Google’s attention, you need to use the same NAP – Name, Address, Phone Number – everywhere you’re mentioned online. Inconsistent business information can harm your search results rankings.
Website Optimization
We're some of the best technical SEO experts in the business. Why? Because we actually understand the technology behind every website. Where other contractor SEO agencies fall flat, we're able to come in and find problems that would otherwise go unnoticed. Our websites incorporate all the fancy technical stuff that you'll need to be successful in the eyes of Google, and other search engines. From under the hood, to the way your site looks and functions, it will be set up properly.
Link Building & Acquisition
Links from the right sites can help your website show up in Google’s search results and local map. But spammy links will get your site the wrong kind of attention – causing you to disappear. Our contractor SEO strategy is unparalleled in executing link-building strategies that get your site the attention of high-quality websites. We combine content marketing, publicity, and local engagement to help you outperform the competition online. Once the basics are in place, your local SEO strategy needs quality links to deliver maximum ROI.
Reviews & Reputation Management
Your clients, and Google, pay a lot of attention to your online reviews. In fact, negative reviews can completely decimate even the best SEO strategy. Unfortunately, every business gets a negative review from time to time. Thankfully, the way that you handle a negative online review can actually help you win over new customers. Our agency knows how to help you keep negative reviews to a minimum, by driving genuine, positive reviews to all the right places. We help successful contractors maintain their online reputation with customers and Google – ensuring our SEO strategies deliver big results.
Local Paid Search
& Online Advertising
Paid search engine marketing and social ads can generate a massive surge in new client estimates – if they’re created and managed properly. Our agency helps clients effectively manage the money they have invested in ad spend. We know how to balance aggressive tactics with cost-saving execution. We help clients set up call tracking, conversion reporting, and other tools to ensure you can carefully track and appreciate how powerful our ad campaigns are – while quickly identifying and stopping underperforming campaigns that are costing you money.
CONTRACTOR SEO Return on Investment
SEO is one of the most effective ways to get a return on your website.
Unlike paid ads, strategic search engine optimization is a long-term strategy that can provide continued growth for your contracting business.
Will Seo Work For Me?
Every contractor has an opportunity to increase their online presence. Overall effectiveness depends on many factors, such as the competitiveness of your local market, and your overall strategy. Digital Tradesman can help you develop a plan to help you succeed.
How Long Will It Take?
There’s no set time, but we’ve found a compressive strategy is the most effective way to expedite the process. During our consultation, we can discuss your website’s needs and develop a timeline to measure results.
A Comprehensive Approach.
Search Engine Optimization isn’t “one thing”- it’s a combination of advanced strategies that constantly evolve.
Your website must be handled with specific care and attention to ensure the maximum results.
We pride ourselves on building contractor websites optimized for being found in search results.
Otherwise, what’s the point?
Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs)
What is a SERP?
SERP is a common phrase in the SEO and web development industry. It stands for “Search Engine Results Page”. Simply, a SERP is the page of search results you get after you type in a search in Google. It lists out the websites relevant to the keyword phrase you are searching for.
How are ranking decisions made?
This is a complicated question to answer, but to make it simple, search engines have algorithms that measure the quality of websites based on thousands of factors. A search engine is only effective when it provides quality results, so they work hard to ensure only the best results make it to the top of the list.
Why is it important to be in the top 3 spots?
The top 3 organic results (the listings that appear under advertisements or local listings) account for over 50% of the clicks on a SERP. This means, if you are in one of the top 3 spots, people searching are much more likely to visit your page.
Why is Google so powerful?
As a society, we have adopted using “Google” as an interchangeable phrase for “search”. They are the leader by a longshot, and typically the strategy implemented to rank better in Google yields positive results in other search engines.
Research and Analysis
The research phase of building a long-term search engine optimization strategy for contracting business is the most crucial… unfortunately it’s what most SEO companies skip.
Why?
Because the research is the hardest and most tedious part of developing a contractor SEO strategy.
In order to develop a plan to give you the best chance of getting quality traffic, you must first measure the quality of what already exists. This research includes:
Understanding your products and services (as well as your competitors.)
Identifying keyword phrases that are relevant to the services you provide.
Identifying the top contractors currently ranking for those keywords.
Look for keyword opportunities that are being underutilized.
Analyzing your competitor's domain and backlinks (links to their website).
Measure search volume and determine which keywords provide the highest return on investment.
On-Page SEO
On-page SEO for contractors refers to the structure, code, markup, and content on your website that is crafted to help boost your search results rankings. There are many factors that go into having strong on-page SEO.
Keywords in Title & Headings
Long Tail Keywords
Title Tags
Image Alt & Title Tags
Keyword Placement & Density
Audio & Video Content
Regularly Updated Content
Long Form Content
Internal & External Linking
In order to have a page built to rank in search engines, there are some things your developer must do to give you the best chance.
SEO Friendly URL
Page Meta Descriptions
Optimize Loading Times
Mobile Friendly Design
Sitemaps
SSL Certificates
Content Strategies
Depending on the market your contracting business serves there are a number of ways to develop content for your website that will help maximize your results.
Local contractors that provide services use different methods in developing content for their site. This could include directory listings, landing pages for specific services, long-form blog content to answer customers' questions or highlight your expertise.
Backlink strategies help promote your website across other spaces on the internet, improving the quality and quantity of reviews, schema markup for more accurate results, and much more.
No matter what industry you’re in, there are ways to develop effective content to help get your website clicks.
We work with our clients to develop a strategy that will improve the quality of their pages and drive more qualified traffic to their website.
Local Optimization
What makes Local SEO unique is that Google uses a different set of ranking factors to rank the local search results.
In fact, local SEO for contractors has a set of unique ranking signals, including:
The location that the person is searching from
Name, Address, Phone (NAP) citations
Presence of Google My Business listing
Keywords used in Google My Business profile
Sentiment of online reviews
Keywords used in online reviews
Number of “check-ins” at that location
Shares on social media
Google Maps star rating for that business
We believe in results, not false promises.
Other SEO companies depend on sales jargon and making promises to contractors that they cannot keep.
Here are just a few examples of how Digital Tradesman is different:
- Process
- Fulfilment
- Link Building
- Transparency
- Exclusivity
- Results
DIGITAL TRADESMAN
- Process Our battle-tested formula has been built over 6+ years working exclusively with contractors who compete in big cities and extremely competitive markets.
- Fulfilment The Digital Tradesman team are accountable professionals who deliver quality work.
- Link Building We build the most high quality and authoritative links possible. We’ve scored our client's links from some of the top media outlets in the nation. Simply put, we build links that pack a serious punch.
- Transparency We’ll never work with two competing contractors, so if your competition calls us, we tell them we can’t help.
- Exclusivity Monthly reports showing every task completed by us for you which we are happy to explain when needed so you can trust we are hard at work getting results.
- Results Our clients get the results they are looking for, within the reasonable time frame we set out from the beginning.
Other Contractor SEO Agencies
- Process Lots of trial and error while they figure things out on your dime, while your website sits on page 5 of Google.
- Fulfilment Outsourced to multiple (often overseas) companies, which means low quality work that produces erratic and mediocre results.
- Link Building No link building at all or even worse, tired and lazy tactics like “We submit your site to over a 100 directories”.
- Transparency “If you have the money you can be our client!”, which means you really have no competitive advantage in the event you do get great results.
- Exclusivity No reporting at all or at best a keyword rankings report which tells you very little about the work being done.
- Results “If we give it another 3 months I think we should see some improvement.”
DIGITAL TRADESMAN
THE OTHER GUYS
PROCESS
Our battle-tested formula has been built over 6+ years working exclusively with contractors who compete in big cities and extremely competitive markets.
Lots of trial and error while they figure things out on your dime, while your website sits on page 5 of Google.
FULFILMENT
The Digital Tradesman team are accountable professionals who deliver quality work.
Outsourced to multiple (often overseas) companies, which means low quality work that produces erratic and mediocre results.
LINK BUILDING
We build the most high quality and authoritative links possible. We’ve scored our client's links from some of the top media outlets in the nation. Simply put, we build links that pack a serious punch.
No link building at all or even worse, tired and lazy tactics like “We submit your site to over a 100 directories”.
EXCLUSIVITY
We’ll never work with two competing contractors, so if your competition calls us, we tell them we can’t help.
“If you have the money you can be our client!”, which means you really have no competitive advantage in the event you do get great results.
TRANSPARENCY
Monthly reports showing every task completed by us for you which we are happy to explain when needed so you can trust we are hard at work getting results.
No reporting at all or at best a keyword rankings report which tells you very little about the work being done.
RESULTS
Our clients get the results they are looking for, within the reasonable time frame we set out from the beginning.
“If we give it another 3 months I think we should see some improvement.”
Our Contractor SEO Process
No proprietary processes, false promises, or lies.
Honest, ethical work, done right.
1. Audit & Strategy
Upon engagement, the first tasks we perform are a website and backlink audit to ensure we are building on bedrock rather than sand.
With the dozens of contractors we have worked with, every single one had some issue or challenge that made it unique. So rather than taking a cookie-cutter approach for every client, we keep an open mind during this process to ensure we accurately diagnose your problems.
Once we have a clear picture of everything affecting your SEO we create a strategy that addresses your challenges and set some clear goals by which we can measure success.
2. Apprentice To Master
Like anything, if you want to have success online there are some fundamentals you MUST have in place before you attempt advanced techniques. Upon launch of your campaign, we go through a labor-intensive 116 point checklist that makes sure those key components are in place.
Some of these fundamentals we address in the setup process are; your firm's Google listing, website page load speed, on-page SEO, creating listings on every quality contractor directory, and ensuring analytics and conversion tracking are giving us reliable information.
Additionally, we create custom reports based on what's important to you and your campaign and schedule them as frequently as you would like to see them.
3. Execute With Precision & Purpose
Now the real work starts with your monthly SEO campaigns. Though they vary depending on your strategy and service level, every SEO Campaign consists of monthly link building and content that will help your clients to see you as a knowledgeable and credible source to come to when they have questions related to your expertise.
A key component to Digital Tradesman's SEO services is the QUALITY of the links that we build for our clients. Link building is very time-intensive, tedious, and requires that you think outside of the box at all times which is why most SEO companies either do a poor job or pay for cheap links that can and will eventually hurt you.
4. Measure & Adjust
Ever measure something, cut it, and found out that you messed up?
Well, sometimes shit happens. We'd be lying if we told you every campaign we launch immediately sees the projected results in the expected time frame.
Any professional, who is an expert in their craft, tends to be overconfident at times and make adjustments too late. Like wishing you had remeasured that piece of wood again before you cut it.
While we have the utmost confidence in our strategies and tactics we also are humble in our approach to SEO and understand that it's really about results - namely, that if you aren't getting them, it's time to make an adjustment.
Digital Tradesman strives to deliver results that measure up so we don't get cut.
WHY CONTRACTORS LIKE YOU
Choose To Partner With Digital Tradesman
Streamline Your Marketing
DIY marketing leads contracts left with a pile of “parts” that don’t quite seem to fit together. You need help putting the right pieces into place to achieve your goals, streamlining the process for a more focused and comprehensive approach.
Free Up Your Time
You’re an expert in your field, not digital marketing. Stop wasting time trying to make it work. With Digital Tradesman as your strategic partner, you can rely on our expertise and guidance, freeing you to focus on your trade and the tasks that need your attention.
Get Measurable Results
One of the biggest advantages of digital marketing is tracking and analytics. Each facet of your marketing efforts can be meticulously measured and analyzed helping you make smarter decisions over time and increase your return on investment.
Accelerate Your Growth
When you're ready to grow your contracting business, you don't have time to waste trying to figure out how to make all the technical stuff work. As your strategic partner, Digital Tradesman can set your contracting business up for online marketing success.
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
About Contractor Websites
Does my contracting business need local SEO?
The short answer is your website could probably use some SEO services to get more out of it. That being said, there are degrees of SEO. The more competitive the market you are trying to dominate, the more SEO work there is to be done to standout. Typically in our first conversation, we can give you a general assessment of what sort of resources you will need to allocate to your SEO to see dominant results.
Will local SEO help clients find me?
Yes! Regardless of your local area, there are people searching on their laptops, computers and smartphones every day for a qualified contractors to help them. As you know, so much goes into a client choosing you over your competition but if you're not appearing in the local results when people search for a contractor, you are not even in the race. We will help make sure that's happening.
What does local SEO cost?
It all depends on how competitive your market is. We have smaller market clients who spend $1,200 a month on their SEO with us and do very well and we have clients that spend well over $3k a month to compete in extremely competitive markets. The key for you to understand is that our fees are not based arbitrarily on what we think we can charge but rather the amount of links we are building monthly, the quality of those links, the amount of content we are creating for your site and the level of support we are providing.
Do you offer consulting?
Absolutely! Our goal is to help your contracting business in a way that is cost-efficient and effective. We can schedule a time to review your current performance online, and help shape your future contractor marketing strategies. Let’s discuss your needs. We’ll customize a plan that makes sense based on your current marketing resources.
What guarantees do you offer?
We guarantee concrete deliverables in terms of reports, links we build and content we produce for your site. We don't make any guarantees in terms of results because there are too many variables that are out of our control that make it impossible to make promises along the lines of of number of clients or rankings. That being said we give every client realistic expectations in terms of ranking within a given timeframe and in the rare event we fall short of those expectations, we will work like hell to remedy that shortcoming to make sure you are happy with our service.
I've been burned before by other SEO companies. Can I pay you once I see results?
This is one of if not THE most common question we get from contractors. If there was a way to get paid off the revenue our clients make as a result of our marketing efforts, we would make significantly more income (we know because we have explored this option!) but unfortunately we are not contractors and legally it gets tricky. Because of that, there's really not a legal and ethical way to have a 'pay for results' arrangements.
I’m working with another SEO agency. Can you audit their work?
We’re experts at picking apart other people’s work. We’ll help you identify strengths and weaknesses. After we complete our audit, we’ll provide a comprehensive, easy-to-understand report. You’ll be able to confidently provide feedback to your current marketing partner. And, if you’re ready to work with a more experienced agency that specializes in contractor marketing, we’ll help you transition smoothly without risking damage to your current web properties.
How long does it take to get ranked?
The starting point for every contractor we work with is unique but generally speaking, you will see positive improvement in your rankings within 60 days. By your sixth month having us work on your SEO, you can expect to have a linear, easily distinguishable pattern of traffic and rankings increases that is impacting your new estimates.