If you’re trying to market your contractor website, it’s important to know that search engine optimization is more than just about keywords. Ignoring other factors of your website can result in not getting the SEO ranking results you want.
Contractor Charlie lists some of the other top ways you can get your contractor website to rank higher.
Address the Technical Side of SEO
A beautiful website showcasing your best projects means nothing if you don’t handle the technical side of SEO.
One change you can make is switching from HTTP to HTTPS. Using HTTPS means that your website is more secure, and makes it harder to get attacked by hackers. Going from “http://www.jimspoolparts.com” to “https://www.jimspoolparts.com” makes your site more trustworthy. It also helps that Google now uses HTTPS as one factor to when page ranking.
Ensure that your pages are loading as quickly as possible. Most users are gone after 15 seconds if they can’t find what they’re looking for. A slow website will eat into that precious time, so it’s important to monitor this. Luckily, Google offers a Test My Speed tool for free.
You also need to verify that the search engines are crawling your web pages. Taking this step may help find any indexing issues or duplicate pages. Tools such as the Moz Site Crawl and Deep Crawl may be able to help with this.
Image SEO
Image search can be a good source of website traffic. For this reason alone, you should consider image SEO for all relevant pictures on your website.
What is image SEO? It’s a blend of different aspects, such as alt text, image quality and size, image selection, and even the name of the file. These will help show off your products and projects in image searches and will help gain more traffic.
- Alt text: This helps Google and other search engines understand what the image is. This needs to include one of your focus keywords. Ensure that it’s descriptive and detailed while keeping it relatively short.
- File quality and size: This plays a big role in how fast your webpage loads. The best file size depends on what the image is used for. But images that are above 100KB in size can negatively impact the load time. Tools such as Compress JPEG, TinyJPG, and the WordPress plugin Smush It can help manage this. Remember to find a balance between size and quality when compressing images.
- Selection: There are many sites, both free and paid, to visit when choosing images. Unsplash, Shutterstock, Stock Free Images, and even Google’s image search are just a few. When choosing an image, ask yourself: Is it relevant to your webpage? Does it help the user by explaining the topic? Is it appealing and attractive enough?
- Filename: Search engines also read the name of the image file when crawling your site. The file name should describe the image contents, include your focus keyword, and use underscores.
Using these best practices for optimizing your images will only help your chances of getting better rankings.
Keep Readers Engaged When Writing Long-form Content
Search engines seem to favor long-form content in their rankings. If you choose to write this type of content, great! But you need to keep your readers engaged when they have to read through so much content.
Content Structure
Avoid using more than 4-5 sentences per paragraph. When readers see one paragraph after another written like this, they tend to just glaze over the text and could miss something relevant.
Use subheadings, bullet points, timely bolded words, and blockquotes to break up big chunks of content. Using these can make it easier to consume content, list important items, and get your idea across.
Content type
Remember our discussions about images? Those can also be used to break up content, and to reinforce your ideas. Using a bullet-pointed list, here are some types of images you can use:
- Infographics
- Gifs
- Screenshots
Videos can also be used, as long as they follow the same purpose of reinforcing what you’re discussing. Remember to apply image SEO best practices to maximize your ranking potential.
We Can Help Your Contractor Website Rank Higher
If you’re feeling behind because some of these tips aren’t used for your contractor website, it’s not too late to change course. Our staff can guide you through some of these top ways to rank higher in the search engine rankings. If you’re not using these tips, contact us today and we can help you.
