As a construction business, more than likely, you’ll want to target local people and businesses who are looking for your services. This saves long journeys across the country and can help build a strong reputation in your area. But how exactly do you ensure your business is reaching the right people in your area, or the chosen area you want to target?
This is where the term “local SEO” comes into play. Local SEO is the process of developing your business’s online presence and visibility in a specific area. For example, if you’re a construction company in Sheffield, you might want to target Sheffield as your main area of service.
Wildcat Digital are an award-winning SEO company, and we’ve put together some tips to help you in your local SEO journey. Keep reading to learn how to target local SEO for a construction company.
Why Do Construction Companies Need Local SEO?
In short, if homeowners and businesses can’t find you online when searching for exactly what you offer, they won’t know you exist. If you’re not visible in local online searches, you might be losing out on jobs, while your competitors shoot ahead because they’re showing up in the right places online.
With local SEO, you can target local searches, increasing your online visibility in the area by showing in things like the map packs in search results. The more visible you are in local searches, the more enquiries you’ll receive from people in your area.
Local SEO Tips For Construction Businesses
If you want to show up in local searches such as “construction company near me”, take a look at the tips below to improve your local online visibility.
1. Optimise Your Google Business Profile
Probably one of the easiest and quickest methods to improve your local SEO is to optimise (or create) your Google Business Profile (GBP). With an optimised GBP, your construction business can appear in Google Maps results and the local 3-pack on SERPs. This business profile is typically one of the first impressions customers will have of your business when searching for you online.
To optimise your GBP, you should:
- Ensure your name, address, and phone number (NAP) details are correct and consistent with all mentions of your business.
- Collect and respond to reviews – even the negative ones – to show you are engaged with your customers.
- Use high-quality images and videos to showcase your business. Think things like meet the team images, completed projects, your warehouse, etc.
- Post regularly, updating your profile to show business updates, project news, and more.
All the above send trust signals to Google that show you are an active profile, people enjoy your services, and that you are who you say you are. These signals help Google understand that your business is legitimate, active and relevant for local searches. That’s why a construction company business profile is so important.
How to rank in Google’s Map Pack
2. Target Local Keywords
Keywords are the terms you use throughout the content on your site to signal to SERPs and customers what it is that you do. These keywords should reflect queries customers might search for. For example, a business looking for construction services might search for “commercial construction company”. With local SEO, you take these keywords one step further by making them location-specific: “commercial construction company in Sheffield”.
These phrases should be placed naturally throughout your content in:
- Page titles and metadata
- Headings
- Body text
- Service descriptions
- Image alt text
- FAQs (if applicable)
3. Build Location-Specific Service Pages
Your service pages might be performing well for broader terms, but if there are no mentions of the location you supply, it won’t do so great in local searches. To combat this, you should create dedicated services pages that are tailored to the specific areas you serve. This can be towns, cities, or regions, for example, “Civil engineering in South Yorkshire”.
If you create several location-specific service pages, ensure that the content on each page is unique and does not copy the same service description, despite it being the same offering. Each page should include:
- Service information
- Details around projects you’ve completed in that area
- Client testimonials/case studies, if applicable
- References to the location you want to target
Ensure you don’t simply swap out the location names on each page, and make the content unique to that location and the projects you have completed in the area.
4. Build A Local Backlink Profile
Backlinks are links to your website from other trusted sites, and are strong ranking signals when it comes to SEO. If you can build a strong backlink profile with locally relevant websites, this can boost your local SEO efforts.
Some ways to organically gain local backlinks are:
- Ask previous local suppliers or subcontractors to link to your website through a project or partner page.
- Partner with new local suppliers and/or subcontractors and ask them to link to your website.
- Join relevant, local trade associations or business groups.
- Submit press releases about things such as major projects, company news, or any awards you may have won.
- Appear in mentions about local developments that you have worked on/will be working on in the area.
If you want more information on backlinks, take a look at our detailed blog, “What Are Backlinks And Why Are They Important?”
5. Use Customer Reviews
A strong reputation is a trust signal Google looks for when choosing how to rank your website. Reviews are also important to potential customers, as they may research your business before choosing you.
Make it super easy for customers to leave reviews by offering several platforms to choose from in addition to Google, such as Trustpilot, Checkatrade, etc. You can even send follow-up emails after the project is completed with direct links to a review platform. Once a customer has left a review, don’t stop there! Reply to their review in a professional manner, even if it’s a negative review, and make each answer personable and not a copy-and-paste job.
Take a look at our blog, “Reviews: The Missing SEO Ranking Factor”, for more information on how reviews can help your business.
6. Target Local AI And LLM Results
AI and Large Language Models (LLMs) are becoming an increasingly popular way to search for answers. To ensure that you’re targeting these results for local searches, you should:
- Ensure your business name, address, and phone number (NAP) are consistent across your website and top directories.
- Use a clean site hierarchy with keyword-focused pages for your services pages.
- Use schema markup to help LLMs and AI tools understand your content.
- Use concise, direct answers in your content. Bullet points are a good example of this.
AI tools and LLMs work by scouring the internet for answers and compiling them together. If you have a consistent voice across your website and your NAP info is correct, you stand a higher chance of being cited. Schema markup helps this by making it clearer to the machines exactly what is in your content, as they do not read the information like humans do.
How Local SEO Can Help Your Construction Business
Targeting local SEO is a great way to boost your online efforts and visibility in your area, or an area you wish to target. Once people start to see you appear in their searches, and they begin to trust your business through things such as the reviews left on your GBP, or the backlinks you’ve gained from other reputable sources, you could start to see an increase in leads and enquiries from people and businesses in your area.
Wildcat Digital is an award-winning SEO agency that provides SEO for construction companies of all shapes and sizes. From small bricklayers to large architectural firms, we focus on helping you reach your SEO goals and gain a consistent pipeline of enquiries. So whether you need local SEO for residential construction services or for your commercial construction services, Wildcat Digital can help.
We have helped construction businesses meet their local SEO goals, gaining more website clicks from local people and, more importantly, more project bookings.
Contact us today to see how we can help your business improve its online local visibility.
