Construction Marketing Tactics That Work in 2021

Commercial construction contractors often don’t employ their websites as strategic salesmen. It’s a common missed opportunity to attract more organic leads with easy, time efficient tactics that can turn your existing site into an active tool.

Even if you’re not tech-savvy or marketing-oriented, we have a list of baseline search engine optimization (SEO) power-ups - using Google analytical tools, changing your short title and page tags, developing a thoughtful content strategy, performing keyphrase research - that have proven to increase leads, traffic, and conversions.

Commercial construction is an industry built off of handshakes and face-to-face meetings, but those interactions aren’t the entire picture. You’re ready to properly grow and scale your business into something bigger and smarter using forward-thinking strategies. You don’t just want to create success for yourself; you want to manifest success for your company as a whole.

Why Should I Care About My Commercial Construction Website?

Your website is your digital sales person. It’s the frontline salesperson who will either convince organic visitors that you’re an established brand with a resource of industry-specific knowledge or not. When designed properly and maintained, tracked, and managed consistently, your website has the unique ability to reach a near infinite number of people in any given business day.

SEO has the unique power to boost entire brands from an infrastructural level, but construction companies often leave these larger marketing considerations by the wayside. And to that we say: sales people are only as scalable as the number of calls they can make in a day, or the meetings they can schedule in a day.

How do you begin to make improvements and what should you be keeping in mind? This guide book will ensure you’re not only casting a wide digital net, but that you’re casting nets in the right waters.

These basic steps will guarantee that you’re reaching the right audience with a high intent to buy via the content on your website.

So, Where Do We Begin?

Like any good story, it’s important to start at the beginning (unless you’re Quentin Tarantino). The beginning for you is defining your ideal audience and creating short biographies of who the people you want to read your content, land on your website, and ultimately convert are.

In marketing, these demographic bios are called “customer personas” and they’re crucial to developing thoughtful methods to target your ideal audience, whether they’re managers, architects, engineers, GCs, or any other particular job type your sales team is best at converting.

We’ve developed a simple and comprehensive questionnaire to help guide your customer persona development and offer your team a clearer idea of who to best target here.

We’ve also written about the importance and relevance of customer personas in detail here, which we highly suggest you familiarize yourself with to best understand how you should be conceptualizing and understanding your customer demographics.

Keyword Research

Now that you know who you’re speaking to, how do you most effectively determine what to say?

Our SEO and content mantra is closely tied to the Answering Customers’ Questions methodology, which is rooted in the idea that the best way to drive organic traffic and leads is by establishing yourself as a helpful resource of information by proactively answering searchers most common online queries.

Part of that tactic involves research into what the most common queries around your brand, services, and offerings are. This requires the use of established analytical tools like SEMRush or Spyfu to gain detailed insight into the metrics of common queries so you can target the words that match your business’ intent, keyword ranking difficulty, and search volume.

For example, if you’re an industrial paving contractor looking to rank for widely-searched commercial construction keyphrases, you’ll want to target keyphrases specific to industrial paving to ensure you’re attracting the right kind of traffic with a high intent to buy.

We’ve also written in detail about keyword research and other crucial SEO elements here, which we encourage you to check out to learn more.

Industrial demolition keyword research SEO

Top Website Power Tools

Once you’re confident in your determination of who is best to target, you can focus on some easier, baseline tactics for maximizing your ability to accurately target them. Here are some easy ways you can up your SEO game:

Download Moz Bar. Moz Bar is a site-saving (and free) browser plug-in that offers critical insight into the codic elements of your website you’re not able to read yourself. Moz provides a comprehensive high-level overview of the most essential elements of your site, their respective statuses, and what you can do to improve.

H1 Tags. The importance of strong H1 tags can’t be overstated. Not only does this critical homepage title often serve as a brand promise/introduction, but it’s also an important area to place an feature the primary keyword target for your brand you identified during your keyword research.

Meta Descriptions. Meta descriptions are essentially concise summaries of the content on each page, and help both contextualize your content in Search Engine results as well as signify to Google’s site crawlers how relevant your content is to various queries. If your site is built on WordPress, we recommend using the Yoast plug-in to help attach and qualify meta descriptions on each page without having to custom-code. Alternatively, if you’re using HubSpot, you can easily change meta descriptions yourself on their “Optimize” page.

Google My Business. In order to be formally and effectively setup for location search, it’s imperative you’ve setup a Google My Business listing.

Google Search Console. This is where you’ll submit your sitemap to Google for crawling/analyzing, and where you can gain immediate insight into any obvious or urgent errors that need addressing.

Social Media. Make sure you own all of your social media channels! These not only provide new and direct audiences for your brand to engage with, they also provide free and powerful backlinks to your site, which helps strengthen your overall domain authority. Similarly, you should make sure your homepage links back to your social media channels.

Photo Tags. Although it’s admittedly meticulous, one effective way to boost your SEO is to make sure that every uploaded photo on your website is accurately tagged with relevant keywords and descriptions.

Google Analytics. The only way to effectively maintain your website’s Search Engine performance is to track and monitor it! Google Analytics makes this easy by providing helpful information in an intuitive layout that details every high-level and granular detail about what visitors are (or aren’t doing) on your website.

Google Tag Manager. By implementing this tool on your website and linking it to your brand’s Facebook and LinkedIn accounts, you can collect valuable data that can be used for advertising campaigns.

Content Strategy

You wouldn’t start development without blueprints, would you? (We hope not)

No matter what your task or industry, to be truly effective, it’s important to have a plan. Your content strategy is exactly that: a plan for what you’ll accomplish, by which means, and when. Only with a long term roadmap can you make an informed and efficient journey to your destination.

Put more simply: your content strategy is putting your keyword research into action.

One easy (and enlightening) place to start is by conducting interviews with your own team. Afterall, your sales team is already actively answering your customers’ questions on a daily basis and can be an invaluable resource in providing your team with an understanding of what your customers’ top questions are and which ones aren’t already being answered on your website.

Throughout this process, it’s vital to always put yourself in the shoes of your customer. If they’re a building owner you’ve recently provided a new commercial roofing system, will they know that they need to maintain routine bi-annual inspections to keep their manufacturer warranty in good standing? Are they aware of the latest and greatest designs, practices, or resources that can make them better assets to their own buildings?

Right now, there are potential customers who have questions that will lead them to your products and services. The trick is providing answers before they even realize they need you and offering proactive solutions to the problems they may not realize they have yet.

Commercial Construction Contractor SEO Content Strategy

Write Content

And now you write! Google tends to like pages that are 900+ words, so use that as a rough target for the pieces of content you’re creating around your brand. And make sure that within your content, you’re always providing outbound links to relevant content on your website related to your topic. Conversely, make sure to update other pieces of content with links relevant to your newest piece.

Bonus points: structured data, schema markup, location based search optimization, and voice search optimization, all of which you can learn more about here.

There is a seemingly endless list of SEO tasks, tactics, and metrics to track to ensure you have the highest performing and converting construction website in your market, but these are some essential starting points. Even if it’s outside of your general wheelhouse, the quick and fundamental points we’ve outlined above won’t take more than a few hours to understand and implement.

And, if done effectively, you should start to see results within 30 days.

To learn more about all of the basic elements that should be included on your homepage, check out our plethora of content that can better educate you and your team and make your website a power powerful asset for your commercial construction company:

The basic elements of any successful homepage can be found here.
To learn any and everything about content writing for SEO, click here.
In this SEO 101 deep-dive, we go into even greater detail about key elements to help scale and boost your brand here.

And if you’re ready to talk to the pros about how to really take your website to the next level, fill in your details below and we’ll reach out to get your project started right away!

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