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There are many understandable reasons for general contractors to lack a strong online presence. Your clientele tends to be local and it’s a busy profession, often taking up too much of your time to focus on setting up and maintaining a website.
Even when you try to get going on your search engine optimization (SEO) with the best of intentions, it’s easy to make mistakes that will hurt your rankings.
In this blog, the team at LinkNow will discuss some common mistakes that general contractors—and many others—make when creating their websites and content. We’ll also discuss ways you can address those issues so you can climb the rankings.
Table of Contents
Many of the common mistakes people make with their websites stem from a misunderstanding of what search engines are looking for when selecting web pages to display on the results page.
A search engine’s goal, first and foremost, is to help its users find relevant and helpful information for their searches. That’s why search engine algorithms try to identify which web pages will be the most helpful for a given search.
Google, the world’s largest search engine, uses over 200 ranking factors to determine its results. However, it will generally consider a page relevant and helpful if includes the following:
Now that we understand the goals of search engines, let’s look at some common mistakes people make with their SEO.
When we talk about content quality, we’re talking about how well your content can answer a search about its topic. Essentially, you want search engines to recognize that your page contains relevant and helpful information on the main topic and that past readers have found it interesting.
For content to be helpful, it must provide information on what it claims to be about, and readers must be able to understand it.
The most important aspect of content quality is clarity and accuracy. You especially need to avoid:
Errors hurt your site’s reputation. Readers are less likely to trust a page with errors, and they’ll leave quickly once spotting them. This could lead to high bounce rates that harm your ranking.
Suppose you title a page “Home Additions” but get sidetracked and end up writing half of it on tiling or framing. In that case, search engines will recognize that your page isn’t actually offering much information on home additions, even if you sprinkle the phrase throughout the page.
This is because:
The fix for low-quality content really comes down to having the following:
All the above are time-consuming tasks. At LinkNow, we have an in-house content department dedicated solely to creating well-researched, high-quality content for our client’s websites.
Search engines have become increasingly wary of attempts to trick their ranking factors with spammy content. They can detect when a page is trying to deceive them and will punish it accordingly. For this reason, there’s really no substitute for putting in the time and effort to create good content.
If you’ve ever tried to familiarize yourself with digital marketing, you’ve probably heard of keywords. Keywords are the words or phrases used on a page that relate to your page’s topic and signal to search engines what the page is about. Ideally, your page comes up on Google when someone searches for the keywords you’ve prioritized for that page.
Appearing high on search engine results pages (SERPs) for a keyword requires a careful strategy, and there are a few common ways to go wrong. Here, we’re going to talk about keyword stuffing and keyword cannibalization, two mistakes people often make in their content that can lead to search engines penalizing the page.
You’ve identified the keywords you want to rank for and now you’re integrating them into your content. It might make sense to think, “Well, I’ll just use the keyword as many times as possible so that search engines know my page is about the topic.” That’s known as keyword stuffing, and, unfortunately, it will only hurt your rankings.
There are a few reasons keyword stuffing leads to poor rankings:
Search engines want to reward informative content that will correspond accurately and helpfully to the user’s search. That’s why search engines work hard to detect unnatural attempts to trick the algorithms into ranking a page higher. Punishing keyword stuffing is one of the most common ways they eliminate poor content.
Let’s look at a hypothetical example of keyword stuffing. Say you’re writing a page with the keyword “home building in Dallas.” If you’re trying to mention that phrase as much as possible, you might wind up with some pretty unnatural sentences.
For example: “When you need high-quality home building in Dallas at affordable rates, look to our home building in Dallas experts. We’ve got all your home building in Dallas needs covered.”
These sentences look completely unnatural with the keyword stuffed in where it doesn’t belong. However, keyword stuffing is a common mistake that many people make if they think:
In reality, search engines don’t simply look for a keyword but also what’s around it. They’re able to recognize that a keyword should be surrounded by other words that relate to it and that different formulations of a keyword are all talking about the same thing.
To take our “home building in Dallas” example, search engines will rank you higher if your content contains information on related topics, such as:
Keyword cannibalization occurs when you use the same keyword across multiple pages, putting your pages in competition with each other. It can arise from having two pages on the same topic, but the more likely scenario is that a page has an overly prominent secondary keyword that matches another page’s primary keyword.
For example, if your page on “Home Building in Dallas” contains many mentions of your expertise in “flooring installations,” that could put your page in conflict with your page on “Flooring Installations.”
There are tools you can use to comb your site for these issues, but they can be tricky and sometimes expensive to use without some expertise. The best way to avoid keyword cannibalization manually is to keep track of the content on your site and avoid oversaturating your pages with a specific keyword. Unfortunately, that can also be tricky and is hardly foolproof. This is just one of the reasons many people look to outsource their digital marketing to an agency that will keep track of this information.
You’ve found your keywords, written good, natural, informative content, your site is up and running, and you’re even ranking well! It’s a dream start, but it’s just the start. You need to keep updating your pages, or you’ll eventually slip back down the rankings.
Search engines value new content. They aim to provide relevant information to a user’s search, which means current information. If a user searches for a general contractor, search engines are more likely to prioritize a well-built website that has been updated recently over one that hasn’t been changed in two years.
Businesses and industries change. As far as the search engine knows, the older site only confirms that the company provided services two years ago, and it may contain outdated information on materials, processes, and requirements.
The only fix is to update pages by adding new content or replacing what already exists on the page. Often, the best pages to update are the ones performing well since these will be the easiest to get to or keep at the top of the search engine results page. Make sure you’re measuring your website traffic so you can decide where best to put your new content.
The vast majority of internet users can tell when a site looks sloppy or unprofessional. Similar to how poor-quality content damages your reader’s trust, so too does a poor website design and technical SEO. If a user clicks on a site that immediately looks unprofessional, they’re likely to go back to the search results page immediately. Again, this will hurt your bounce rate, sending you down the rankings.
Here are some common website design errors to avoid:
Fixing these issues takes some familiarity with web design. If you need a helping hand, consider outsourcing your web design to the professionals at LinkNow. Our websites start at budget-friendly prices and can be up and running before you know it.
We also let you preview your website’s final design before launching it online—ensuring you know what your web design will look like before it reaches your potential clients. Feel free to book a free product demo with a LinkNow rep to see what your website will look like!
For general contractors, pictures can be one of the best marketing tools, showcasing the visual appeal of your work. Adding photos to web pages is a great idea, but to take full advantage, you need to make sure you’re not making some easily avoidable mistakes.
The three most common errors people make with images are:
Alt text is a description of an image attached to that image, almost like a caption, but it isn’t visible if you’re scrolling the site.
Alt text has two main purposes:
Imagine you’ve added a photo of a newly renovated bathroom on your “Bathroom Renovations” page. Let’s look at four potential levels of alt text, from worst to best:
This one is straightforward. Search engines prioritize sites that load quickly and get users the information they need as fast as possible. Large image file sizes can take a while to load and slow down your site, hurting your rankings.
The best fix is to shrink your image and compress the file size while keeping it visible and clear. Blurry or too small images can lead to users leaving the site quickly, a factor that can hurt your rankings.
Broken images are images that no longer exist, meaning there’s just a gap or a broken image icon where a photo should be. This can happen for a variety of reasons, from a mistake when creating or editing the page to an issue with the link to the photo.
Broken images lead a user to think a page is outdated or low-quality. This can cause users to leave the page quickly, thereby hurting your page’s ranking.
The fixes to image issues all seem straightforward, including:
However, these solutions can be quite difficult if you’re unfamiliar with computers and web building. When you need some professional assistance, LinkNow has dedicated website builders and designers who can help you showcase your work on your site.
Local SEO refers to setting up your website to rank well for searches with local intent, such as searches for a “general contractor near me” or a “general contractor in my area.” Since search engines want to reward pages that best respond to a user’s search, they’ll reward pages that they can verify are in that specific area.
General contracting is local in nature—you’re unlikely to do much work two states away—so local SEO is especially important.
The best way to ensure you appear in local searches is to maintain a Google Business Profile, which helps you appear in local searches on Google and searches for a general contractor on Google Maps.
There are other local directories you can list your company in, such as:
One of the first steps we take at LinkNow is to set up these profiles for our general contractor clients so they can have maximum visibility on local searches. We expand and grow our clients’ local profiles with leading citation management techniques to help them appear locally when a customer is looking for their services.
When you need help promoting your general contracting company and maintaining a strong online presence, reach out to our team at LinkNow. We’re a digital marketing company dedicated to making small business life easier through website design, content creation, and targeted on-page and off-page SEO.
We work with over 10,000 small businesses, with general contractors making up a large share of our clientele. We have the proven expertise to help your website rank highly, bringing you qualified leads and more business.
When you’re ready to get noticed online, book a free call with a LinkNow rep to discuss our packages, your vision, and how we can help.