Construction SEO: A Guide to Keyword Research for Contractors
Keywords research is the core part of SEO construction marketing strategy since it provides valuable insight into the queries that your target audience is actually typing on Google. In this post, we’ll define what construction keyword research is and how to do keyword research for your SEO strategy.
What is Construction Keyword Research?
Construction keyword research is the process of finding and analyzing search terms that your target audience enters into a search engine such as Google. By using exactly what keywords and phrases people are searching for, you can create content around what people want to discover. In other words, your content is likely successful in getting in front of your audience as they conduct research online.
Part of the keyword research process involves choosing a topic, which in this case will help the audience solve their problems but it's important to be based around the product, service or solution your building products company provides.
How to Do Research Keywords for Your Construction SEO Strategy
Step 1: Make a list of important, relevant keywords and topics based on what you know about your construction company and audience
Identify a list of topics that are relevant to your business and your target audience may be interested in your content. Based on the topic buckets, you’ll come up with some specific keywords that your business to get found. For home remodeling companies, you might have general topic buckets like:
“Home remodeling company”
“Home renovation”
“Landscaping”
“Interior remodeling”
“Hardscaping”
From these important topic buckets, you can generate different sub-topics you might need to create content on to be successful on that topics.
Aside from your intuition, you can start to use keyword research tools, competitors' insight, analytics data, internal search data, Google suggestions, and historical data from your client to construct your initial “seed word” list.
Step 2: Expand the construction keyword list
Keyword research SEO tools can help you come up with more keyword ideas based on your generated ideas. Not only that, you have an understanding of the relative search volume of all your keywords and how difficult to rank them.
Some of the most popular keyword research tools include Ahrefs, SEMrush, Ubersuggest, Google Keyword Planner, Moz, Keywordtool.io, and KWFinder.
Step 3: Narrow down your keyword list
In keyword research tools, you get search volume and traffic estimates for keywords you’re considering, then you cut down any terms with too low search volume, and flag keywords that you have a chance of ranking. These keywords are little competition and have a high volume, but are overlooked by your competitors.
Step 4: Categorize your priority keywords
Once you have a priority list of keywords for your campaign, you should categorize the keywords into segments specific to your construction services. The keyword categories may include product type, sub-brands, business group, keyword-based, or keywords that map to a specific business goal or customer segment.
Step 5: Identify keywords based on the SEO funnel
Then you will determine which keywords are associated with each stage of your buyer’s journey. You will use refined keywords to generate content that fits the audience's search needs from attraction and awareness to evaluation and finally, to conversion.
Step 6: Refine Your Keyword List Over Time
It’s important to pay attention to your traffic data and analytics data to identify new keyword phrases that may be new opportunities for your business. This is especially true for new brands and sub-brands as well as keywords that are driven by seasonal behavior.
Hopefully, this keyword research process will provide a good structure foundation for your own construction SEO program. Good luck!
