As a custom home builder, it's important that your business is visible to prospective customers online. According to GE Capital, 81% of consumers will research a product or service before choosing a brand, making SEO for custom home builders an extremely important piece of a marketing strategy. Often times, however, we find that home builders are not sure where to begin or are simply too busy to focus their efforts on optimizing their website for search engines. That's where Profitworks comes in.
We've created this simple guide to SEO for home building businesses to simplify the process and help you start getting the website traffic and sales that you're looking for. If you're looking for managed SEO services, contact our team for a fully managed, personalized strategy that will help you achieve your goals even faster.
Ready to start making the most of your online presence? Contact Profitworks to start getting the results you're looking for!
SEO For Custom Home Builders
Just like starting a new home project, breaking ground on an ongoing initiative like SEO can feel daunting. That's why we've included 5 simple steps to help you get started.
1. Optimize Your Website
Optimizing your website for search engines is the first thing that you need to do to start gaining visibility in search engines like Google and Bing. To simplify this process, it helps to break up the steps in website optimization in two categories: technical SEO and on-page SEO. Technical SEO is not related to the content that exists on your website, but it is related to the experience that users will have when they get there. For example, given the growing number of individuals that use mobile devices to browse online, it's important to ensure that your website is mobile-friendly. It's also important to ensure that your site loads correctly across devices and that users are not landing on broken or error links. These technical aspects of your website are all considered by search engines when they determine which pages are the best to direct users to.
On the other hand, on-page SEO is very closely tied to the content that is found on your website, including both text and images. A major aspect of on-page SEO is keyword research. It's important for you to identify the keywords that customers are searching related to your product or service, and create quality content that will allow you to rank for those keywords. Important places to include these relevant keywords include H1 tags, meta descriptions, website URLs, image titles, and throughout the content as well. This will improve the likelihood of search engines recognizing your website as having authority on the topics you are trying to rank for, bringing more customers to your page!
For more details surrounding on-page and technical SEO, feel free to download our free ultimate guide to SEO!
2. Release Blog Articles
Knowing the role that keywords have in search engine optimization, it's no surprise that releasing blog articles can significantly increase your likelihood of ranking for keywords on the web. For example, as a custom home builder, writing blog posts on keywords such as "home builders near me" and "custom home designs" will greatly increase the chances of Google recognizing your website as an authority on custom home building. This will mean that more users will be able to find your website when searching for keywords that are related to your business and you'll have the opportunity to convert them once they click through.
Just like the rest of your website, optimizing your blogs for search engines is still critically important. It's important to make sure that you are writing high-quality content that will be valuable for your readers. Search engines want to provide thorough, insightful answers to the questions that users are asking, and your ability to be considered will depend on the quality of the content that you write. This means it's important to be writing content that is unique (i.e not a duplicate of anything else on the web), robust (i.e articles that are 500+ words in length), and scannable, including images and headings to make articles easy to review quickly.
3. Claim your Google My Business Listing
A Google My Business listing is one of the best ways to increase the chances of your business displaying in Google results for your product or service. With the rise of mobile usage and voice search, more and more customers are searching for location-based keywords, including "custom home builders near me." With a Google My Business listing, Google will recognize the location of your business and is more likely to share your brand a result for people searching in your area.
Another major benefit of having a Google My Business listing is the opportunity for customers to leave reviews for your brand. With each review, not only will Google favour your listing over similar, unreviewed brands, but it will also signal the quality of your services to customers looking. Choosing a home builder is an incredibly personal decision for customers, and having the opportunity to read reviews from happy customers will solidify their perception of your brand.
Another important thing to consider in deciding whether or not to claim your listing is that unclaimed listings often create negative perceptions of the business' availability in the eyes of customers. For example, customers may think that your business is no longer running or is difficult to communicate with if a listing is not present when they search for your brand, product or service.
4. Use Google Analytics
Without the ability to measure and improve upon your efforts, implementing an SEO strategy can be futile. Tools like Google Analytics are critical in helping you track your website traffic from all sources, including organic results, direct searches, referrals from social media, and more. In addition to tracking traffic from these sources, Google Analytics also provides insights into what customers are doing on your website, including their behaviour after landing on a page, how long they stay on the page, and whether or not they convert.
Using Google Analytics is a fantastic way to set goals for your website and monitor your website's ability to meet them through A/B testing. For example, if your objective is to increase the number of contact forms filled out by customers looking to chat about their custom home, setting up conversion tracking on your website is a great way to monitor your success. If you noticed that people are landing on your contact form but are not converting, this insight will allow you to modify the page or your website content to turn your traffic into sales for your business.
5. Generate Quality Links
Once you've optimized your website, it's time to share it with the world! One of the best indicators of your website's value to other people in the eyes of Google is the number of high-quality links it is receiving from other websites. Each time that another webpage puts a link to your website on their page, it is a vote of confidence from that website that yours is worth visiting. For a home building business, links from similar, popular websites like Houzz will improve the ranking of your website. If you're not sure to where to start in generating quality links, look for opportunities to request links from authoritative content, and include share triggers on your pages to make sharing them simpler for readers.
Keep in mind, though, that the number of referring domains your website has is also considered by Google. For example, although it may be easy to find 10 sites that are willing to link to you 100 times, it's much more valuable to receive 100 links for 100 websites that all see value in your content. When it comes to links, the number of quality domains are more important than the links themselves.
Let's Get Building
We hope that you feel prepared to start taking the right steps towards optimizing your website for search engines!
Still feeling a little overwhelmed? We understand. SEO is an ongoing commitment for your business, and you have other priorities! Why not consider outsourcing your search engine optimization initiative to experienced professionals? At Profitworks, we've helped custom home builders just like you optimize their websites through customized strategies and one-on-one support. Not only will outsourcing save you valuable time as a business owner, but it will also get you real SEO results faster.
Ready to get started? Contact Profitworks today!
