SEO for construction companies

The difference between SEO for web copy and SEO for Web content

For virtually every piece of writing on your website, there should be some SEO considerations behind it. However, there are subtle differences you’ll need to take into consideration for different kinds of content.

Your website homepage

Many elements go into writing great copy for a website. We cover many of those elements in our complete guide to digital marketing for construction companies. From an SEO perspective, you should be peppering a few keywords through your homepage and other auxiliary pages to capture some organic traffic. Those keywords will depend on your business.

As an example, if you’re a Manchester construction company specialising in regeneration projects, you might pick a few keywords to put on your home page. One obvious candidate would be, ‘Manchester construction company’ while ‘Regeneration projects’ would satisfy your specialism. With this in mind, some of your homepage web copy might read as follows:

‘XYZ Construction are a Manchester-based construction company specialising in regeneration projects.’

Your bank of SEO optimised content

Newsflash, this article is a piece of SEO optimised content, designed to attract organic traffic for a specific search term. Having a bank of content is a long-term strategy that’s geared towards engaging with your target market and getting your name in front of them. To be effective with it, you’ll need to understand the questions your target audience want answers to. If you can decipher the questions on their mind, you can craft content aimed at answering those questions.

As an example, a small developer might have a question about planning for a regeneration project. Once you establish this as a question your target market frequently ask, you can craft a blog/article on the subject. Such a piece of content might be titled,

‘Everything you need to know about planning for regeneration projects’

In this example, the keyword you’re targeting is ‘Planning for regeneration projects’.

Unlike the web copy for your website proper, SEO optimised content is in-depth and substantial. Where your homepage might have 250-400 words on it, an SEO optimised piece of content can clock in at anything from 1500 to 3000 words.

Where to put your keywords

Once you’ve established what your keywords are, it’s time to start peppering them through your copy and content. However, where you place your keywords can have a direct effect on how successful you are at climbing the rankings.

Page title

Whether it’s your home page or a blog, putting your keyword in the title is important for SEO. If your website is built via a template supplier like Squarespace, this is very easy to do. Simply select Heading 1 as the text size for the snippet of text with your keyword in it. If your site is built from scratch, you’ll need to go into the HTML of the page and wrap the appropriate piece of text in an H1 tag.

You might not always be able to put your keyword in the page title. This is particularly true of things like your services page, where your page title is going to be fairly self-explanatory. In these instances, you can use Heading 2 text or an H2 tag for your keyword in the form of a subheading instead of a page title.

Page URL

Putting your keyword in the URL of a page is another easy way to get a small SEO boost. This is great for SEO optimised content like blogs and articles, but not particularly viable for your regular website pages.

Title tag / meta tags

The title or metatag of a page is the clickable link that will appear in the google search results. Most website hosting/building platforms will allow you to easily edit the title tag (or metatag as some call it). Again, if you built your website from scratch, you’ll need to go into the HTML to edit it. The title tag is arguably one of the most important places to put your keyword, as it both influences your clickthrough rate (an important metric for improving your SEO) and directly improves your SEO ranking by helping the search engines understand your content.

Meta descriptions

Meta descriptions are nice to add if you have time. They’re a short extract Google displays below the link to your page in the search results. However, Google won’t always use it. Sometimes, it’ll just pull information from the article itself. There’s no scientific way to know whether it will use your meta description or pull information from the article, so you’re only writing the meta description on the off chance it could be used.

The meta description itself doesn’t have a direct effect on SEO rankings, but it can give your reader an idea of the page’s contents, hence improving your click-through rate and improving your SEO indirectly.

Keyword density

When it comes to your actual copy and content, you might think you’d be better off cramming as many instances of your keyword into your content as possible. Let me settle it here and now: Keyword cramming does NOT work. It’ll make your writing seem unnatural and Google will rightly see it as a cynical attempt to game the algorithm.

You should use your keyword/keywords a few times but only where it comes across naturally. As a rough guide, in a long-form blog post (2000 words and over) I tend to use a keyword 5 or 6 times. With much shorter bits of copy like your homepage or your services page, you’ll probably only use your keyword once. It’s really about keeping it natural and fitting it in with moderation.

So there you have it – a crash course on SEO for construction companies. Putting time and effort into your SEO is a cost-effective investment that will pay dividends over time. Once an article is written and starts doing well on the search engines, it’ll consistently bring you new leads without much effort from you. You might need to occasionally update your blogs and web pages if new information becomes available, but this work is minimal in comparison to the benefit that comes from well-curated content and top-quality web copy.

If you’re looking for an agency to help you climb the search engines, give Luma a call and we’ll set you on your way to SEO success.