Having a strong digital presence is a foundational component to the success of your marketing strategies and business development goals. Whether you operate locally with specialized markets or provide general contractor services nationwide, concrete SEO strategy cements your credibility in the industry (trying to get these out of our system early) and will increase both the number of qualified project leads in your inbox and talent looking to join your team.
Before we dive into search rankings, it’s important to remember that ultimately, we’re looking to reach people – not pander to algorithms or robots. As shared a few weeks ago, “When done well, SEO improves the overall experience for your visitors…key for both bringing in customers but also recruiting new employees.”
Building the Foundation
Metadata: Helping Search Engines Help You
Google leverages title and heading tags to determine the core message of the page:
- Title Tags: This is the text that will show up as the clickable link within the search result.
- Title tags, also referred to as meta titles, also appear as the text at the top of the browser tab.
- Heading Tag: Title tags don’t appear on the body of the webpage, but heading tags do (also known as H1)! This is why it’s important to assign both within your metadata HTML.
- Meta description: Within Google’s search results, the meta description is the ~160 characters that appear below the meta title.
- This is how you prove to users that the page they’re about to click on is going to serve their needs. By not defining a custom meta description for a page, you run the risk of the user reading boilerplate copy about your business and -understandably- moving on to the next result that includes copy more relevant to their search term.
If your page content is mislabeled or irrelevant to a search term, your site is likely to be dinged. These penalties are expressed through ‘bounce rates’, the measurement of users clicking on your site from a search result, and then leaving (bouncing) without navigating to any other page. As a benchmark, service-focused sites should expect a 10 – 30% bounce rate. It’s important to note there are also off-page SEO metrics that affect your rankings that you don’t have full control over, such as the personal search habits/history of the user.
Keywords: The Seeded Draft
Showcase in-progress and completed projects
Talk about your project management approach and the locations you work in. You don’t have to spill any trade secrets but you should give potential clients an idea on what it’s like to engage your team and reinforce your service expertise.
A complaint we often hear from construction companies is that their clients rarely understand the full breadth of services offered, logging a company in their Rolodex for one service only. Project portfolios and case studies are a great way to layout auxiliary service offerings.
Brand values
Not only is your approach to workmanship and safety likely evolving (giving you new opportunities to keep content updated) it should be exhibited as a key component of your identity and differentiation.
Team structure and employee benefits
Make sure your job listings are updated alongside perks/benefits. Your recruitment team will be thankful for web content they can share with potential employees to showcase what it’s like to join the team.
For more on how to rank locally (ie ‘Best Portland concrete contractors’), “Bulletproof Keyword Research For Local SEO” is a great resource.
