Construction companies, how to create a website that gets you more clients

You’d be forgiven for thinking construction is about as far away from digital as you can get. After all, you can’t lay a brick from the comfort of a computer screen, can’t mix cement remotely from your smartphone, and sending an email is not going to help you install a steel girder. But by neglecting the digital world, you’re missing out on a wider audience, better clients and ultimately more revenue.

In this blog, we’re going to look at what you can do with your website to help you reach a new audience, win over new clients and increase your revenue. By the end, you’ll come away with the tools you need to take your online presence to the next level.

Creating and maintaining a top-quality website

Your website is the most powerful tool you have at your disposal when it comes to digital marketing. It bleeds into virtually every aspect of your digital strategy and you’ll often direct leads to it from your other channels.

You should think of your website as an opportunity not just to show what you’re about, but to tell your potential clients how you’ll make their lives, business, and projects better. This leads us to our first piece of advice.

The power of benefits

We’ve spoken before about the power of benefits in web copy and nowhere is it more appropriate than your website. Many companies make the mistake of talking about themselves rather than talking about what they can do for their potential clients. This kind of mentality will have a knock-on effect on your ability to persuade new clients to sign a contract.

Businesses and the people that run them don’t care about much other than what you can do to improve their business or their life. For that reason, your web copy should address that need. Instead of telling your customers all about you, tell them what benefits you’ll bring to the table, how you can improve their developments and why you’re different from the other construction companies out there.

Optimise your website for the search engines

SEO strikes fear into the hearts of many non-marketers with its intimidating terminology and ‘technical’ processes. These fears are unfounded. At its heart, it’s quite a simple process that is increasingly important in the internet age. The top result on Google gets 33% of all the traffic, meaning if you’re anywhere below that, one-third of the spoils have already left the game. As you get further down the search results page, your share of the pie gets smaller and smaller until it dries up altogether.

There are several things you can do to give your SEO a boost. First and foremost, it’ll require some research on the term you want to rank for. You can do this via a tool like Ubersuggest or SEMRush. These platforms will help you find the perfect search term that’s both appropriate, high volume and as low difficulty as possible. They’ll also give you suggestions for alternatives and provide you with a means of checking out the websites that currently rank for those terms.

Being that we’re talking about construction companies, you can expect your keyword to be something like ‘Construction Company Manchester’. Once you’ve established your keyword you can set about sparingly peppering the keyword through your web copy (DO NOT overdo this). You can also play with your site’s meta titles, meta descriptions and URLs to gain a further edge to your SEO, but the specifics of this are a topic for another blog.

For a comprehensive look at what you can do to get ahead of the game with SEO, check out Backlinko’s definitive guide to on-page SEO.

Demonstrate social proof

As we wrote about recently, social proof is a powerful tool when it comes to convincing potential clients that you’re the real thing. Outside of the digital world, this manifests itself by word of mouth. Businesses feel safer commiting a significant outlay if someone they trust has vouched for your services.

In the world of digital marketing and your website in particular, reviews, testimonials and case studies are the key to social proof. As part of your project management process, you should be getting testimonials from your clients to share across your online platforms, particularly your website. Even if your potential clients don’t read your testimonials in full, they’ll feel safer knowing that they exist and that you’re not an unknown quantity.

Demonstrate your expertise through a portfolio of case studies

Just like your potential clients will be on the lookout for what your past and present clients have to say about you, they’ll also be casting a critical eye over your past work. This is where a varied portfolio of case studies come in handy. If, say, a developer working in the hospitality industry is looking for a construction company to build a new restaurant, they’ll be looking for a construction company with those projects in their locker.

This is where you can get clever. Whatever kind of client you’re targeting, you can cater your case studies to their line of work. Don’t just throw up a few pictures, get into specifics. Get good quality photos of your work and give details about what your client needed and how you provided it. Talk about the challenges and how you brought your problem solving to the table to create a great project for your client. Once you’ve done all that you can top it all off with a quote.

Don’t be afraid to get in front of a camera

Video is an underused format that can give your website a massive boost, both in terms of attracting clients and empowering your SEO. People’s attention spans are short and people are often cowed by lots of text. Video offers a much more accessible option that makes it easier on your audience, allows the personality of your company to shine through and increases the ‘dwell time’ of visitors to your websites – A powerful commodity that increases your position in the search engines.

If you’re looking for an agency to build you a website that brings in new clients, give us a call at Luma Marketing and we’ll make your online presence work for you.