Over the years, local search has become increasingly important for your construction company’s SEO strategy. Google, on the other hand, has played its role in continuing to continue making updates. In fact, to serve the most relevant results to the users, Google is now placing a lot more emphasis on factors like engagement and location to determine the relevance of a website.
So, to maximize your success in local search, you must familiarize yourself with the most significant local SEO ranking factors. Read this blog to discover what these factors are and why local search is important in the first place.
Why Is Local Search Important?
Perhaps, you have already heard about SEO, also referred to as the optimization for browsers, and have a good understanding of why it is also important. However, do you know why local search is also important for your construction company?
A local search typically involves a lot of tactics used for increased visibility of websites in specific geographic regions. This is more useful for small to medium-sized businesses that rely mainly on local clientele. This one is for you if you are still starting your business.
Here we list some of the benefits of local search, proving how important this is:
- Better online visibility: Local search activities like backlink profiles and citations boost your online visibility. This makes your construction business more easily discoverable by new clients.
- More in-store foot traffic: Better local visibility can bring more foot traffic to any location.
- Targeted web traffic: Optimizing your website for local search can deliver more targeted traffic to your website that can lead to more leads, sign-ups, sales, and subscriptions.
- More calls: Google My Business or Google Business Profile optimization can lead to more enhanced Google Maps visibility. As a result, there are more calls and in-person visits.
- Thought leadership: Content Marketing helps you build a thought leadership position, giving you the impression of an expert in your field.
- Enhanced trust levels: Management of your reputation builds trust in your construction business.
- More sales: People view online reviews to help their decision-making when choosing a local construction business.
- Improved conversion rate: Optimization of your website can bolster your conversion rate and increase form submissions, email subs, phone calls, and sales.
- More competitive: Local search nudges you to become more competitive by encouraging you to study what your competitors are doing and what strategies are working for them. You can use what you learn and incorporate it into your approach.
Local SEO Ranking Factors
Ready to make the most of your website’s local ranking? Let’s go.
1. On-page SEO
The content of your construction website is the most obvious place to begin when optimizing for local SEO. One of the most Google ranking factors is content quality since this makes your website a more relevant and significant result that better serves the users or searchers.
- For content: Make sure the content of your website is well-written and relevant to your keywords. While it is crucial to include them on your website, ensure to use keywords more naturally. If possible, use them in URLs, meta des, page titles, alt texts, and headings to strengthen the connection.
- For local SEO: It is worth ensuring that your phone number and address are featured on every website page. Place them in your footer or header, allowing them to be found by Google without being inserted into the page content.
2. Google My Business
Your Google My Business listing is also one important local search ranking factor. When you create and claim your GMB listing, ensure that your construction business name, phone number, and address are correct. This is very useful not just for your target clients but also because the proximity of your business to the searcher is one of Google’s major local ranking factors.
For your GMB profile, make sure to:
- Optimize the listing by completing everything as fully as possible.
- Check out that your business hours are right and that the links to your construction website are updated.
- Adding a logo and high-quality photos improves the appearance in Google maps or local pack.
3. Backlink Profile
One of the biggest areas of local Search Engine Optimization you must pay attention to is your backlink profile. While your website content is significantly important and easier to control than external factors, your SEO tactics will not be successful if you only optimize on-page factors. Thus, you should focus on off-page factors, too, especially your backlinks.
Gone are the days when more links meant better rankings, despite what these links were. Today, Google has made many updates and is putting more value on relevant, high-quality links. When it comes to local ranking factors, we suggest you target more local backlinks.
4. Reviews
If you got positive reviews, expect this is another one of the several local SEO ranking factors that Google is basing on to determine how well you rank. Remember that Google maps show an overview of your business reviews; thus, focusing more on getting positive reviews from happy clients is advisable.
Now, you may be thinking that only Google reviews are being considered. However, the fact is a lot of major review sites are also factored in. Some key review signals come from your GMB profile, Yelp, Facebook, etc.
5. Online Citations
We already mentioned how important it is to ensure that your business name, telephone number, and address are correct. This is again necessary, especially when your construction business is mentioned online. All the information you provide should match all the details you place on your website.
Always keep on top of your citations. Avoid being inconsistent or placing incorrect contact details and business names online. And whenever you create new citations, double-check the details before hitting the submit button. Get into the habit of regularly checking for new listings for your website, and ensure to claim or edit any that are inaccurate.
6. Behavioral Signals
Google is more inclined to serve your website in the SERPs if it has a good reputation for being helpful. Some factors like CTRs (click-through rate), clicks to call, and check-ins can show Google that some users are interacting with your website. And the more users interact with your website, the higher your website ranking.
Optimizing your construction website for local SEO is an effective way to boost your behavioral signals. Content quality is counted again in this section. But we suggest using landing pages this time to ensure that you have a stronger page specific to each of your most significant keywords. Doing so will provide a much better user experience, informing Google that this particular page is a useful result that must feature high up in the rankings.
7. Search Personalization
Search personalization was introduced more than a decade ago to provide the most significant results for an individual. While some generations will most likely be the same regardless of how is searching and where some factors like physical location and the browser history of users can influence the rest of the results. If the user chooses a particular website from the SERPs, let’s say your website, Google automatically learns that it should be shown more frequently.
While it can be difficult to improve your CTRs, you can still do something to make your website experience a lot more positive so that your target audience will come back. The more users receive personalized results that point back to your website, the more this helps your local rankings boost.
8. Social Media
Social media networks are becoming search engines in their own right. The high domain authority and the user base of social channels like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram mean that Google pays close attention to them. Have you tried searching your company name and seeing the results right away?
So, if people are constantly talking about your construction brand via social media, this feeds into your rankings too. Google’s algorithms are proven smart enough to know whether these mentions are positive or negative. That is why monitoring and engaging with your social media audience is also important. This is to preserve your reputation.
Incorporate social media into your local SEO strategies and allow it to work alongside other factors discussed above.
Boost Your Local SEO Rankings with ConstructionMarketing.io
With so many things to consider when it comes to these Google Ranking factors, you may find yourself becoming too overwhelmed.
Local SEO is a very complicated task that often requires maintenance in several areas. You cannot simply optimize your Google My Business listing and then expect to land in the local pack overnight. That is why you should consider partnering with some experts to help in increasing the effectiveness of your local SEO efforts.
Here at ConstructionMarketing.io, our team of SEO experts and data-driven marketing professionals has a wealth of experience in boosting your client’s local SEO rankings. Our integrated full-service digital marketing agency can cover the full spectrum of your brand’s marketing needs. In fact, we offer various online marketing services, including Social media marketing, SEO, Keyword Research, Web Design and development, Google My Business, etc.
Contact us today. Let’s create a comprehensive strategy tailored to boost your SEO rankings.