If you own a business, chances are you’ve heard about SEO. It’s a marketing term, and it can be used to drive traffic towards your website and make your business more visible to customers searching online. But what does SEO actually mean? How does it work? What can you do to best manage and improve SEO for your business? Thankfully, you’re in the right place. Keep reading to discover some SEO tips and tricks for construction marketing that every business owner should know in 2022!

What is SEO?

SEO, or search engine optimisation is the acquirement of views or website traffic from free, organic or natural search results in online search engines such as Google. The aim of SEO is to increase your website’s position or ranking in a search engine results page (SERP). The higher your website appears in the search results, the more likely it is to be viewed by potential customers. This is achieved through the use of keywords, along with a number of other factors that we will touch on later. For example, if you own an emergency plumbing business on the Mornington Peninsula, you may want to target the keywords “Mornington Peninsula emergency plumbing” or “Plumbing repairs Frankston”. Keep your SEO on the Mornington Peninsula to ensure your keywords are relevant to your location. By using these keywords consistently throughout your website content, you are showing the search engines that your website is relevant to these keywords. This means that when someone goes to search for “Mornington Peninsula emergency plumbing”, your website will show up closer to the top of the search results.

However, good SEO is not just about the keywords. It also involves creating:

• High-quality, valuable content that has been optimised to look and read well for website users.
• Quality internal links to other parts of your own website, as well as external links to other related websites.
• Meta-data descriptions for your written content, photos and videos on your page.
• High-speed webpages that perform well
• Consistent measuring of the results, re-evaluation and updating.

All of these factors add up to create your SEO and will determine how well your website performs in the algorithm of a search engine. The better you perform, the higher your website will rank!

So how does a search engine determine what’s relevant?

A search engine must first verify your site using crawlers. Crawlers are programs used by the search engine to discover and re-discover new and pre-existing pages on the internet. This done through the use of links, which is why internal linking and backlinking are so important for your website and your SEO. Search engines also use indexing, which takes place after the crawlers have received all the information from the websites. Indexing is a process used to store content from websites and deliver it to a search engine results page. After the crawling and indexing, a search engine will analyse different web pages against certain ranking factors such as keyword relevance, page speed, backlinks, mobile optimisation etc. This helps the search engine determine which content is relevant. It’s important to note that search engines do not publish their ranking factors. It’s highly agreed on that Google has over 200 different criteria to consider when ranking a page, but there may be more unknown criteria as well. However, the factors we have listed are recognised as the most important in ensuring your website is visible.

How to utilise SEO to your advantage

So now that you know how SEO works, how can you make it work for your business, increasing your website traffic and your search results rankings?

Keywords – Research keywords related to your business that are popular in your area. You can do this by looking at Google’s suggestions when you type in a single word, e.g. plumbing. Make a list of all of the keywords that are relevant to your business. Once you have a good list of keywords, you need to use them throughout your website. Use them on the home page, the services page, the about us page, and anywhere else that you can use them on your website. Publish blogs, FAQs and case studies which use your keywords consistently.

High-quality content – Make sure that you’re creating high-quality content for your website. A popular form of SEO content is blog posts. These posts can be rich in keywords whilst also providing useful information to your site visitors. You could write a blog post about “5 easy ways to properly maintain your plumbing” or “How much does a plumber charge?”. This kind of content can bring in traffic and boost your page ranking if done to a high standard. As mentioned above, FAQs are another type of content that can be used for SEO, along with videos, guides and case studies. All of this content can be utilised to improve your SEO.

Web design – Ensuring that you have a high-quality website is another major factor in determining how good your SEO is. This can require some collaboration between web developers and designers to create a website that looks good and functions correctly. Make sure to carefully consider who you choose to design your website. You don’t want to spend an excessive amount for a website if you’re after something simple. However, you also don’t want to go too cheap and receive a poor-quality website that won’t do your SEO any favours.

Header tags – Header tags are another highly important SEO factor which include title tags, meta descriptions, and more. These are all within the HTML of your website, which is accessed through the backend of your website. Learn how to create high quality header tags that describe your content and give context to its usefulness and significance. Improve SEO for your business by learning how to create header tags that reflect the significance and usefulness of your content.

Backlinking – Link building is crucial to your SEO. It’s a top-ranking factor, determining where your website appears in search results. Backlinking makes up 46% of the reason that sites rank in search engines. The more outgoing links you earn from other high-quality websites, the better your website is favoured. To increase your backlinks, you can submit your business to well-known directories, and organically improve them through creating valuable content on your website that others can link to.

If you’re still stuck for ideas, you can visit our blog “5 DIY SEO tips for tradies with examples”.

Understanding SEO is one thing, but implementing all of the above practices and consistently updating them to improve your visibility can get overwhelming. There are many factors and considerations when taking on your own SEO and it can become difficult to stay on top of, especially as a business owner. If you need some assistance with construction marketing, reach out to Carter Marketing. We’re a local tradie marketing agency on the Mornington Peninsula that understand small business owners within the construction industry. If you would like a free website report to see whether you should start your own SEO activities, please contact us here.