(5) Search Engine Marketing with SEO and Google Ads for Contractors.
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Corey Halstead
Owner, HALSTEAD.
Past experiences with search engine optimization professionals may have soured many owners and leadership on the whole concept, but that doesn’t change the importance of organic search and paid search (pay per click or PPC) strategies working in tandem.
Consumer behavior is consumer behavior, and prospects still rely very heavily on the practice of searching online during their project research. In doing so, they will find companies that do what you do. If the companies they find are doing things well on the marketing front, the prospect will begin the process of engaging with their content and being worked down the funnel. Now you’re playing catch-up.
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Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for Contractors.
The problem with SEO—and its paid counterpart, Google Ads—is that more often than not the strategy and implementation are underwhelming to the bottom line. Many companies are currently paying—or have paid and then cancelled—somewhere south of $600/month for a mysterious SEO-related service. You are never quite sure what you are paying for, and it’s often bundled with “website hosting and management” services. Going back to the section on website platforms, this should be a next to nothing line item for you as a design/build firm. Which leaves a little bit of that monthly fee to attempt SEO. Problem is, SEO is time-consuming and at the end of the day, most things come to payment in, hours worked out. Without the adequate fee to cover skilled search talent working the right amount of hours on your account, lackluster results—if any—ensue. Hence the bad rap. Not unlike a contractor who underbids the project to win the bid and then delivers a poor product.
SEO done right is not cheap—and it shouldn’t be. The amount of knowledge required to actually drive search rankings month after month, especially in markets with steep online competition, is impressive. Moreover, the result of a job well done is game changing. Built on fresh content, organic search drives warm, prequalified leads lauded by many firm owners as second to only a referral. They are certainly of higher quality than those from Google Ads, known as paid search. But when paid search is used in close tandem with SEO, it’s a valuable element.
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Google Ads (PPC) for Contractors
Don’t live and die by Google Ads. So many companies spend thousands and thousands of dollars a month on PPC, with little to no other complementing strategies in place. That’s a race to the bottom—not only to the bottom of the budget barrel, but to the bottom of the lead quality bucket as well. Paid search should be used in conjunction with SEO. What does this dance look like? On the organic SEO side, keywords and service locations are being tracked in software, allowing you to know exactly where your website ranks for critical keyword combinations—i.e. you rank spot 11 (top of second page) for “custom kitchen design” or spot 22 (top of third page) for “patio installation.” That data and knowledge should feed directly into your Google Ads keyword strategy. For instance, if your landscape construction company ranks on the third page for a core keyword like “patio installation” and it’s May 1 in the Northeast, you’ve got an opportunity. Just buy that keyword on Google Ads, spend the next few months ranking on the top of the first page, and work your SEO strategy to get the term organically ranking in the meantime.
