SEO for Tradesmen: Your Guide To Winning Rankings

Whether you are a plumber, electrician, carpenter, or other tradesman, search engine optimization is a key piece of your overall digital marketing strategy. By investing in SEO for tradesmen, you can connect with people actively looking for your services, attract more customers, and ultimately grow your business.

The Basics: Why You Should Invest in SEO for Tradesmen

SEO is essential for any business to be successful in the digital age — including tradesmen. The primary purpose of SEO is to optimize your website and its content to improve the site’s visibility in search engine results pages.

The Goal of SEO for Trades

If someone searches for a term related to your trade, you want a page or blog on your website to be as high on the SERP as possible. For example, if you are an electrician and someone in your area searches “how to fix a broken electrical wire” or “electrician near me,” your goal is to show up as one of the first results on the page. By making your website more prominent in search engines, you can bring more visitors to your site and gain potential customers for your business.

The Benefits of Organic Content Marketing for Tradesmen

SEO is an organic marketing method, which means you are increasing your business’s online presence without relying on paid advertising or promotional methods. The core principle of organic marketing is to create valuable and relevant content that appeals to your ideal client and gains their trust.

Organic marketing aims to naturally draw the attention of people who are genuinely interested in your trade services. SEO content marketing includes writing web pages with keywords that relate to your services and publishing content that provides useful information and positions your business as a trusted source of information and expertise.

When compared to other marketing methods, such as Google Ads or social media marketing, organic content SEO provides several key benefits:

• Low costs: Organic content marketing is a generally more affordable method for bringing in leads to your business. The only cost for generating content is content creation. With paid advertising methods, you would need to pay both the content creator and ad platform to bring in new web visitors.
• Long-lasting results: One piece of content can generate new leads for your business for years. As long as the content stays relevant and continues to perform well on search engines, you can continue to attract new web visitors without needing to pay for an ad campaign or other recurring costs.
• Increased customer loyalty: According to the Audience Project, approximately half of people online have a negative attitude towards ads on websites, and 41% of Americans use ad blockers. Organic content is less intrusive and more likely to build credibility and foster trust in your brand.

The Big Picture: How Different Types of Trade SEO Work Together

While the term SEO refers to optimizing content across all search engines, most online marketing experts focus their efforts on Google. According to Stat Counter, Google dominates the market worldwide, with over 92% of web users worldwide using the search engine across all platforms.

Google uses complex algorithms to determine how it ranks web pages, focusing on factors including experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. Google doesn’t publicly share how its algorithms work, and they are constantly updated and changed.

However, it is common knowledge that Google ranks pages through crawling and indexing. Google uses web crawlers, known as Googlebots, to discover and analyze web pages. These bots follow links from one page to another and gather information about each page’s content, structure, and links. The bots add the crawled pages to Google’s index, which includes a massive database of web pages.

By understanding how Google performs its magic, you can identify all the pieces that work together to help a piece of content rank. When creating a strategy for SEO for tradesmen, there are three essential components to consider:

• On-Page SEO: Also referred to as content SEO, on-page SEO refers to techniques used to optimize information that exists on a web page. This includes written content, keyword research, meta tags, URL structure, internal linking, and calls to action.
• Technical SEO: This SEO tactic optimizes a website’s crawlability, indexability, and overall performance. It ensures that users and search engine bots can easily access, understand, and index website content. Technical SEO includes focusing on website speed, mobile-friendliness, technical errors, website architecture, and indexing factors.
• Off-Page SEO: When judging a web page’s trustworthiness and reputation, Googlebots often prioritize websites with high-quality backlinks from authoritative and relevant websites. Off-page SEO techniques include link building, social media marketing, and online reputation management.

The Process: How To Develop a Successful SEO Strategy for Tradesmen

A well-crafted tradesman SEO strategy provides a strong digital foundation for all your marketing efforts. Whether you’re looking to increase your online visibility, grow your brand, attract more customers, or scale your business, you need an optimized website and plan for continual organic growth to compete in the digital space.

Set Clear SEO Goals for Your Business

SEO and content creation for a trade business take up time and valuable resources, so you need to have a clear goal in mind. Are you trying to promote a new service? Do you want to improve rankings for an existing web page? Do your home page or service pages need some serious work?

For a website that’s performing poorly, your best line of action may be to rewrite and optimize website pages. If your website is ranking well, but you want to tap into new leads, you may want to focus on blogs that target new markets. If you have a blog or web page you want to boost performance for, you may want to focus on enhancing that page or looking into tactics to gain backlinks and boost your website’s authority.

Before you get into the specifics and start creating content, it’s important to identify which SEO goals you want to target this year, quarter, or month.

Conduct Keyword Research Relevant To Your Trade

You need to identify what words or phrases potential customers are searching for. The goal you identified in the last step should guide the keywords you choose. For instance, if you are a contractor and your goal is to gain more remodeling projects, you’ll want to focus on questions and search queries that someone who is considering a remodel would look up.

Fortunately, you don’t have to give your best guess on what someone might be searching for. With tools such as Google Keyword Planner and SEMrush, you can identify high-value keywords for your trade and target audience. The top factors to consider when choosing a keyword are:

• Relevancy: Is the topic relevant to your audience and the service you provide?
• User intent: Is someone searching that term looking for information or a service?
• Search volume: Are a lot of people searching for that term?
• Competition: How difficult will it be to compete with other websites currently ranking for that term?

Often, long-tail keywords can provide the most value for your business. Rather than trying to target a word such as “remodel,” which would be incredibly difficult to compete for, you would attempt to rank for more specific queries that people are searching for, such as “remodel contractor in Los Angeles” or “how much does a bathroom remodel cost?” You are much more likely to rank on the SERP for these terms, and specific keywords draw in more qualified leads.

Optimize On-Page SEO Elements

When generating and publishing content on your website, there are certain elements to consider that make it more crawlable:

• Meta tags: Write compelling title tags and meta descriptions that include your target keywords, accurately describe the page content and draw web users in with a compelling CTA. Meta tags are what show up on the SERP for a webpage, providing a brief snippet of what readers can expect.
• Headers: Use appropriate header tags to structure your content and make it more readable for users and search engines. Headers, including H1, H2, H3, etc., provide a hierarchy for content on the page and help search engine bots identify what each section covers.
• User Experience: Design your web page with users in mind. This means the content should be easy to read and genuinely helpful. You should also consider adding images, other types of media, menus, CTAs, and other elements that improve the user’s experience without bogging down site performance.

Build High-Quality Backlinks

Backlinks serve as a vote of confidence in your website’s credibility and authority. If a reputable website in your industry links to your content, Google will see your website as more authoritative.

While high-quality content may organically gain backlinks from other content producers, there are other tactics that can be part of a backlink strategy. These include guest posting, influencer outreach, press releases, and creating infographics and other blog graphics.

Local SEO Optimization

As a tradesman, your client base likely lives in a specific locale. Even if you own a franchise and have businesses across the nation, you still need to consider the importance of location when creating your SEO strategy.

Local SEO for tradesmen targets a specific geographical area. If you serve multiple locations, your strategy needs to include content that targets all of these locations. Implement the following strategies:

• Target location-specific keywords, such as “plumber in Las Vegas, NV”
• For multi-location businesses, consider creating location pages for every city or state you serve
• Create blog content that focuses on issues and terms relevant to the area you’re targeting
• Claim and optimize your Google My Business listing
• Include your business name, address, and phone number on your website and all online directories
• Encourage online reviews and respond in a timely manner

Mobile Optimization

While your website was likely created on a PC or laptop, you need to optimize the finished product for mobile devices. Devices can come in many shapes in sizes, and your website needs to use a responsive design that looks great on monitors and phone screens alike. You’ll also need to consider mobile performance and optimize images and files so that they load quickly on mobile devices.

SEO Performance Monitoring and Analysis

The work isn’t over once you create and publish a web page or blog. SEO is an ongoing effort that requires consistent maintenance through monitoring and improvement.

Using tools such as Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and SEMrush, you can determine whether your content meets your performance benchmarks and identify new opportunities for growth. A few of the key aspects to look at when analyzing SEO performance include:

• Organic traffic: This metric shows you how many people are entering your website or a specific webpage organically — meaning they searched for a term and clicked on your website. Tools such as Google Analytics can help you compare how much of your traffic comes from an organic search, social media, a direct search for your company, a link on another site, or other sources.
• Bounce rate: Tracking bounce rate shows you how many people land on a webpage and leave. This means they did not click on another page or get in touch.
• Time on page: The average time users spend on a web page can reveal a lot about the page. If people only spend a couple of seconds before exiting, it shows they likely did not find it relevant or were turned away by something near the top of the page.
• Keyword rankings: Tools such as SEMrush can provide a report of what keywords your content is ranking for and how high on the page the content appears. You can identify the key terms you want the content to rank for and track how the page ranks over time.

Boost Your Search Engine Rankings With Expert SEO for Tradesman

SEO for tradesmen is an essential but time-consuming aspect of growing your business. Our team at BKA Content can help boost your SEO performance with high-quality, research-backed content that increases your online visibility. Get started now to boost your rankings and business growth.