SEO for Construction Companies: More Leads in 2024

SEO for construction companies is the act of improving a website for its relevancy and helpfulness for visitors, resulting in higher rankings in SERPs (search engine results pages). The objective of performing SEO for construction companies is to help prospective clients find your relevant services in the geographies (usually local geographies) where they need them.

According to public data found on IBISWorld, “There are 3,776,498 Construction businesses in the US as of 2023, an increase of 2.4% from 2022.” That’s quite a bit of competition. Deploying a search engine marketing strategy (for both organic and paid) can certainly help a construction business to stand out from competitors and get more visibility around its offerings.

Key Takeaways

• Construction company SEO is the act of improving a website’s performance and relevancy for keywords and questions Users put into Google to be more visible in SERPs (search engine results pages).
• Newer concepts around construction company SEO include building out topical authority maps and creating a number of highly-targeted service pages and location pages to assist clients in finding you through Google.
• Local SEO tactics include optimizing Google Business listings for relevancy utilizing reviews, custom photography, and keywords to appear in “Business” packs when “near me” searches occur.

High-level SEO Strategy for Construction Companies

At a high level, to perform SEO for construction companies we’re going to want to take a look at a few different aspects of our overarching strategy. They can be broken down into:

1. Our construction companies website being optimized for SEO

It’s often easy to overlook small components of a website that could prevent it from appearing in search engines correctly. Optimizing a website for SEO is simply helping Google’s engines better comprehend what a webpage is about. And who the webpage is for.

For example, let’s say we have an H1 on the homepage it says something like the following:

H1 – A Construction Company You Can Trust

While that’s a great start to describing who you are, a wonderful construction company that your customers can trust. When it comes to Google’s crawlers, they’re going to have a more difficult time comprehending who to serve your page to.

We can adjust that H1 to something like this:

H1 – Trusted Construction Services in Chicago, IL

That H1 now contains our target local market and more insights on what we offer to our customers.

Use this as a general example of what constitutes optimizing a construction company website for SEO. We’ll get more into optimization techniques further in this guide.

2. Knowing which target audience and keywords we want to optimize for

The good news is that if you’re the owner of a construction company, there’s a good chance that you already know who your target customers are. And what they’re looking for. However, it’s important to reverse-engineer how your target customers are trying to discover you.

For example, if we’re a local construction company providing residential home building services, what a User might put into Google to discover us is going to vary compared to if we offer commercial construction services.

Keywords for Residential Home Builders and Construction Companies

Here are some keywords that a local residential home builder might want to target:

1. Residential home builders near me
2. Residential home builders in [target geography] (Ex: Residential home builders in Chicago, IL)
3. Custom home builders near me
4. Residential construction near me
5. Residential construction in [target geography] (Ex: Residential construction in Chicago, IL)

Keywords for Commercial Construction Companies

Here are some keywords that a local commercial construction company might want to target:

1. Commercial construction companies near me
2. Large commercial construction companies near me
3. Small commercial construction companies near me
4. Commercial construction companies in [target geography] (Ex: Commercial construction companies in Chicago, IL)
5. General contractors near me

We’ll get more into your keywords and how we target them with particular strategies further into this guide. However, a general idea of the different types of ways that clients may find you are a helpful level-set in what we’re trying to accomplish with our construction company SEO campaign.

For the sake of this guide, we’re going to discuss more of the commercial construction business strategy with SEO. However, if you’re a residential home builder or general contractor, your approach will be somewhat similar.

3. Using the right construction company SEO strategies to help clients discover us

When most people think of “SEO,” they think of blog posts. However, that’s not always the best way to get in front of prospective clients. Often, customers who are looking for you won’t just be looking for the keywords above. They’ll be looking for something very specific to their need. Usually, this is a client who already has some knowledge about construction.

For example, a construction company that’s doing SEO quite well is APX Construction Group. One of the main ways that they’re getting in front of clients is by having highly targeted and helpful service pages.

This pre-construction planning service page ends up being very useful when a client puts into Google, “pre-construction planning mankato mn.” While tools like Ahrefs or SEMrush might tell us that the keywords don’t have any monthly search volume, that doesn’t mean that we don’t receive any benefit from creating these types of service pages.

In short, we need to map out what types of pages we need to create to show Google that we’re experts and authoritative figures in the space that we service. In short, E-E-A-T is defined as, “a framework that Google’s machines use to evaluate the quality of content and websites. It stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. Google’s human reviewers, known as Quality Raters, use E-E-A-T to assess content quality and provide feedback on search results pages (SERPs). While E-E-A-T signals aren’t ranking factors, they can turn into directly impacting rankings.”

More on this as we continue…

4. Ensuring our website is rendering appropriately for crawlers

I wouldn’t normally bring this up in just any SEO article. However, it’s more common to see on construction company websites—a website that’s not rendering properly for mobile devices or generally not built with quality.

If a Google crawler can’t properly render a website for mobile devices or has trouble reading the contents of a website, it’s going to prevent any optimizations that are made to our SEO strategy from working. This is more common in these types of industries (like construction) just simply due to the fact that the website is not usually a top investment for a construction company.

Doing a simple check for some of the following will be helpful:

1. Is the website mobile-friendly? Is it responsive to multiple device viewports?
2. Is there a sitemap that’s available? Is it submitted to Google via Google Search Console.
3. Can the pages get indexed by search engine crawlers? Is there anything in the source HTML code that would otherwise stop crawlers? Is there anything in the robots.txt file that would prevent crawlers?

Using a tool like Ahrefs or ScreamingFrog, you can determine if there are any core issues that might be plaguing the website from appearing in search engines.

5. Having a local SEO strategy with GMB listings

It’s impossible to discuss any local search marketing strategy without including GMB listings. Generally, these are the listings that appear when you perform any type of local or “near me” search. They’ll be under “Businesses” and usually include anywhere from 3 to 4 business listings.

Optimizing a Google Business listing for SEO usually includes some of the following:

1. Ensuring that you have a healthy amount of reviews.
2. Ensuring that you have unique custom photography.
3. Ensuring that your listing contains your target geographic location.
4. Ensuring that your listing contains part of your service types.

As an example, we can see “Commercial Construction” appear in the business name of this listing (G. Fisher Commercial Construction, Inc.). This may be a useful way to attract the right target audience that we spoke about prior. I.e., are you in commercial construction, general contracting, or residential construction?

While optimizing Google Business profiles can be a process in itself. You’ll want to make sure that you have one of thes profiles claimed and that you start driving clients to leave you reviews. If you want to create one, here’s where to start.

Top Tactics for Construction Company SEO in 2024

I’ll do my best here to bring new concepts to the table when it comes to optimizing a construction company website for SEO. You’ve probably heard about most of the basics we covered above. But what are some real ways to start bringing in leads? Let’s jump in:

1. Create as many service pages as you can

When I look at APX Construction Group, one thing I really like about their approach is that they created a number of service pages that speak to everything they offer. From agricultural construction to PEMB construction (Pre-Engineered Metal Buildings).

Think about this for a moment. If you’re working with a bank or potentially getting staffed out by an architectural firm, they’re going to know industry-specific terminology. It’s not just going to be simply, “construction companies near me.”

PEMB construction, as an example, is a very industry-specific term. And even though tools like Ahrefs may tell us that “PEMB Construction in Chicago, IL” has very little to no search volume, it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t create that service page.

Here are a few reasons why:

1. It creates EEAT signals: By creating more service pages and connecting them together through a robust internal linking strategy, we are developing topical authority for our area of expertise. For example, pre-construction planning, PEMB construction, construction project management, and more. All of these are related subject matters. Having pages for each of these, that are well designed for search, helps to establish both topical and domain authority that can be far more powerful than off-page or link-building strategies.
2. It goes beyond just SEO: If a customer finds you through SEO, however, doesn’t know what you offer (complete services list), what are the chances they’re going to contact you? It could be quite low. We want to make sure that we think holistically about our website, outside of just “doing SEO.” Meaning, creating a robust list of services that we offer to encourage prospective clients to call us, email us, or sign up for a newsletter.

Basic services that you might want to consider adding to the website would be construction management, general contracting, master planning, specialty services, and complete design-build. In addition, any specific commercial construction or residential construction services that you offer in the area.

2. Create pages for the areas that you service

When someone puts into Google, “Construction companies near me” — often, Google will automatically locate that User based on geospatial rendering. This is where Google uses the mobile device or computer to reverse engineer the IP address of the Searcher and then serve up highly relevant webpages.

This means that when you design a website or page to appear for “near me” search terms, you don’t actually create “near me” pages, you create pages around specific locations and then let Google do the rest.

For example, using APX Construction Group as our example once more:

We can see that they created pages describing the construction services they offer for every city in the surrounding area they serve.

Here are some of the pages that they created:

1. Rochester, MN
2. Mason City, MN
3. Mankato, MN
4. Fairmont, MN

By creating individual service pages we not only get the added benefit of appearing when someone in our local area looks for a construction service we offer, we also get the benefit of continuing to build out our topical map and topical authority.

3. Create vertical-specific service pages

We’ve spoken about clients finding you by searching for something highly specific like “PEMB construction.” As well as clients finding you by searching for construction services in specific and local geographies. What’s left on the list? Construction services by business type.

“Hospitality Construction Companies” as a keyword, for example, might be searched for by an architectural group that might use if they’re looking to partner with construction groups that have hospitality construction experience.

“Office Building Construction Companies” as a keyword, for example, might be searched for by another architectural group looking for construction firms that have office building experience.

When building out our service pages, we should also consider building out vertical-specific landing pages and optimizing those for SEO (H1, meta description, meta title, and the content of the page).

Here are the examples we can see from the same APX Construction Group:

1. Office and Retail Construction
2. Hospitality Construction

Take the same strategy as you would creating a service page, outlining what you offer, and reformat that to speak to your process and approach for construction with certain verticals. Include relevant projects, white papers, or video interviews and testimonials from customers or other partnered firms.

4. Create a robust internal linking strategy

Internal linking is one of the most forgotten-about on-page SEO tactics. Used correctly, in combination with topical authority, can be far more effective than any off-page SEO strategy for construction companies.

Once you’ve created all of your service and location pages, it’s important to determine a clear and effective internal linking strategy. Our favorite is to consider a dropdown menu in the top navigation bar that includes groups like, “Services” and “Service Areas”.

This simple approach can create highly relevant relationships across pages, giving Google’s rank engines a better understanding of how to process your expertise and authoritativeness (think of this as displaying to Google that you’re highly focused on one subject and that you have a complete and comprehensive understanding of that subject).

Construction Company SEO is About Generating Leads

Let’s not forget that SEO as an acquisition channel should be measured the same way that all other marketing acquisition channels get used, by determining ROAS. The only way to get that is by measuring the effectiveness of generating calls or lead form fills.

When optimizing our construction company website for SEO using the tactics and strategies outlined above, it’s important not to forget a few things:

1. Make sure we have a portfolio of projects

If we’re targeting specific needs in our industry, it’s important to support what we can do through a portfolio of projects. Highlight the individual completed projects by building, construction project, or need. Consider this to be your case study.

Having these projects on the website can assist in taking the lead that came through Google and converting them into someone who contacts you.

2. Make it easy to get in touch with you

Once the construction SEO visitor comes into the website, are you making it easy for them to call you? Make sure to include simple things like your office location, your phone number, or an easy-to-use contact form that can get filled out quickly.

Your goal is to take this visitor and turn them into a marketing-qualified lead (MQL). Make sure that you’re putting the right tools in front of them to make this happen. Or else all of your SEO efforts might go unnoticed by the business.