Get Your Contractor Website to the Top of Search Engines

If you want the website for your contracting company to rank number one in search engines and you're in a large metro area, you may face a lot of competition. But there's more than one way to skin a cat. You may find that it's faster to rank high on search terms like "kitchen update" and "room addition" than for "general contractor." Or for an electrician, the focus might be on "house rewire" rather than "electrician." The electrician may have the longer term goal of ranking high on "electrician," but in the meantime he can gain visibility for his website with less fought-over keywords. The strategy he needs is creating "landing pages."

Creating Landing Pages

Creating landing pages is an excellent way to add useful pages to a website. Here's how it works. Let's say that you're a general contractor who finds bathroom remodels profitable. You can create a special page for bathroom remodels. It can show photos of your jobs or photos of the types of designs customers can choose from.

If the pages include words that people often type into search engines --"keywords" like "bathroom remodel" or "kitchen update" -- this page can become an important landing page for your website. A landing page is the first page of your website that visitors land on.

Usually, of course, the first page that visitors land on is your homepage. This is likely to happen if the searcher types in "general contractor." However, if you create specific pages for keywords that people often search on besides "general contractor," these can also become important landing pages.

General contractors can create special pages devoted to each of a series of topics -- bathroom remodels, kitchen remodels, room additions, and so on. Different pages of the same website can show at the top of Google depending on whether the searcher types in "kitchen remodels," "bathroom remodels," "room additions," or also, of course, "general contractors."

Electricians might want a landing page for "house rewires." Plumbers might want a landing page for "copper re-piping." These are big ticket jobs that customers need a lot of information on before they choose a contractor.

Search engines want to provide the best possible websites for searchers. Many searchers prefer a single website that answers a lot of questions. As the goal of search engines is to please searchers so that they'll search again another day, search engines prefer large, comprehensive sites. Your landing pages will not only each have a shot at a number one ranking, they'll also beef up the content of your site and make it more attractive to search engines.

Landing Page Strategy If Your Website Already Ranks as Number One

Let's say a Boston plumber's website already ranks as number one for the keyword "plumber boston." He can use the landing page strategy to stretch his visibility further. If he creates a landing page for "copper re-pipes," he may be able to push it to rank number one when searchers in the Boston area type in "copper re-pipes." This will give him a second avenue for becoming visible to searchers. When the plumber shows up number one for many additional search terms like "drain cleaning," "emergency plumber," "24 hour plumber," and so on, I call this "Internet Domination." Regardless of how the potential customer searches, he or she will see this plumber's website as number one.

Search Engine Optimization for Contractors

In metro areas with a lot of competition among contractors, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is necessary to push your homepage and any other landing pages to the top of search engines. For example, with SEO you can properly label photos so that search engines understand their value to visitors despite the inability of search engines to decipher the actual content of photos. SEO both makes the website more accessible to visitors and communicates to search engines the value of the website.

However, the first step of both appealing to customers and ranking high in search engines is to create a website with pages that provide helpful and informative information about your trade and designing these to be landing pages for keywords that searchers frequently type into search engines.


Article Source: Kim Hopkins