4 General Guidelines for Contractor SEO

Happy Friday everyone!

I was talking to a contractor earlier this week and noticed something. I often get contractors who are interested in SEO and would like to promote their organic traffic but I hear comments every now and then that I imagine their customers would say as well, “I could do that myself!”. And of course there’s always some truth to that, everyone can learn a specific skill with enough time, but the phrase is generally addressing  to things that are considered “simple tasks”. So in this blog, I hope to cover a couple of tips and quick changes that I think a contractor without any prior knowledge or skill to SEO can do to optimize their website.

Your H1 text.

Every page has a H1 text, this is your main headline for the page. Google uses your H1 to determine what your page is about. A common mistake I often see within contractor pages is that the H1 is a phone number or address instead of a relevant text. One of the easiest ways to determine what your H1 is would be to click and drag to highlight over texts starting from the top left corner of your page. Google reads pages from top down, left to right. Do this and see if you are able to highlight the first texts that appear. If you did not have prior knowledge to this setting, it is likely that the first result is your H1. To replace your H1, you have the option to use your company name, or my suggestion would be something that would describe your business. Lastly, remember that the H1 is on every page. Meaning if you had to make the change for your homepage, you may have to reevaluate every page of your website. 

Quantity of your content 

Recent report says that Google has thousands of ranking factors but content is always the number one ranking factor. Relevant content for the searcher promotes the user to stay and continue using the web. When we understand this fact, it’s easy to see that it would be in Google's best interest to serve websites with the best and most relevant content to its users. When it comes to homepages, the milestone for the quantity of content is 300 words. Any less would be labeled as a “thin” page and have much less authority to rank. In industry standards, the average content is 1000 words, however at LSL we provide our customers with 1500 relevant and quality content to be above majority competition. 

Keyword Stuffing

Content quantity and quality comes hand in hand. When it comes to writing content, the general industry rule is to avoid a 1% to 2% frequency of targeted keywords to avoid keyword stuffing. Keyword stuffing is when targeted terms are overused in writing on the same page. This may trigger a flag from Google, invalidating the ranking authority of your site. At LSL we try to best keep just below the 1% mark. This allows a bit more freedom and flexibility with other keywords for the content. A good rule of thumb we use is to have no more than 10 keywords in a 1500 word count webpage. If there are difficulties, try using synonyms or talk about other services you may provide. You may be thinking, “but my main service is this”, which we fully understand, but homepages should be a generalization of what your website is about, and to allow users to navigate to their desired page. We suggest creating a dedicated service page  where you can talk about your service in detail following the same rules. 

Branding Doesn’t Generate Traffic

This is fairly straightforward and logical, however this is commonly seen across service based websites. Of course brand promotion is great, but in terms of search engine optimization, it does not have any benefits since users are already searching your brand. In that sense, it would be illogical to optimize for users who are already searching for your website destination. We suggest instead to use more keywords and promote services that you can provide.

Bonus Tip - Backlinks from Colleagues 

If you have read our other blogs, you may have learned about reference pages and the importance of backlinks. If you are a contractor and have others that you frequently work in tangent with, for example a home inspector and a plumber, consider asking for reference backlinks. Direct backlink trades are frowned upon unless the two parties are genuinely endorsing each other’s business with relevant content. It is acceptable however, to ask for backlinking and in return link to a separate site. Simply reference from their website to your websites using keywords as the anchor texts you want. Use the NoFollow tool mentioned in the keyword article to ensure it is working. But do keep in mind that this is a method without using SEO tools. No two backlinks are equal in value, for it to be done correctly, consider contacting us now for a free consultation!