As a local contractor, you probably feel like you’ve already invested a significant amount into advertising. Maybe you’ve tried the newspaper, magazines, or road signage. These are all great ways to expand your brand and reach out within the community. However, the downside is that you’re only reaching a very small audience and there’s no demographic targeting involved, just blatant advertising. It can be very discouraging to spend countless dollars on your investments and hardly see a return.
Contractor marketing has seen significant changes throughout the last decade and since the introduction of smartphones, internet searches have increased dramatically and that means more traffic to the sites that rank at the top. Internet marketing has created a new outreach platform for all businesses, including local. By expanding online and investing in areas where it matters like optimizing your website to rank on Google through SEO, paying for direct ads at the top of Google through PPC and reaching out on social media sites like Facebook, you can grow your business cost-effectively, with real-time stats and return on investment calculations so that you know exactly where your money is going.
Ranking on Google for competitive contractor keywords (SEO)
Every keyword phrase such as “Seattle contractors” has a level of competitiveness. The more competitive the keyword phrase is, the more difficult it will be for your website to rank for it. As a contractor, it’s important that you invest in the more competitive keywords within your local area. By targeting the most searched phrases, you can position yourself as an authority and quickly gain recognition in the community once your rankings are at the top. Any contractor marketing company will be able to find which keywords are most profitable for you to target and they will begin to optimize your website for those phrases. There are various ways that website optimization services are done. To begin with, the website’s page content, titles, descriptions, tags, images, videos, internal linking and all other on-site content needs to be optimized. This means optimizing everything to include the target keywords. In doing so, Google will recognize that those phrases are the primary focus of the website and it will weight your site more heavily in favor of ranking at the top.
Once the site has been optimized, off-site optimization work can begin. This involves a process called link building, which is where you leave links to the website being advertised on other higher quality sites. Google will crawl and pick up on those links, which essentially act as popularity votes, showing Google that other sites link to you. This indicates your site may have valuable content and is worthy of being ranked highly.
Pay Per Click ads (PPC)
Many contractor marketing companies will offer a similar service to SEO known as PPC. Pay per click ads allow you to get ranked on Google, but you have to pay for the advertisements and it’s not an optimization process. Instead, you pay Google directly and your site instantly appears on Google whenever a user searches the keywords you’re targeting. Every click that your advertisement reviews will cost you and the competitiveness of your keywords will determine how much you pay for each click. If you have a highly competitive keyword, then it will cost you more for each click. You’ll also be able to define a monthly budget for your advertisements and shut off the ads at any given point throughout the month.
Social Media Marketing
Reaching out to your target audience through Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or Pinterest can be a great idea. While social media can be a tedious way to get clients, it’s most effective at growing your brand and sending a message of authority. If you want customers to respect your business and see that you’re worth their time, you have to make a name for yourself. Social media is one of the best ways to do that.