Home builders often do not pay enough attention to Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). Consequently, with more and more home builders chasing the same clients for the same jobs, it is increasingly harder to stand out. Ultimately, SEO for home builders is about getting new clients to your website and not losing them to your competitors. Being able to stand out in the crowd and increase visibility is not impossible in this saturated market. To help you understand how to grow your home builder business with an SEO strategy, here are 5 tips for optimising your website.  

 

1.  Complete an SEO Audit

Before you dive into improving your site’s performance in search, you need to take some time to audit your site. Auditing your site can help you identify where your website falls short and the issues that could prevent your site from ranking on Google and various other search engines. To complete a successful Home Builder SEO audit, you will need to find the most effective website audit tools to simplify SEO implementation. Fortunately, the web is saturated with a plethora of site audit tools that can highlight the problems in your website that require attention.

 

2. Keyword Optimisation

Keywords are a fundamental component of home builder SEO. When searching for home builders, these are the words and questions that your customers will type into search engines. Therefore, you must appear when your customers are trying to find you. To understand which keywords you want to be ranking for, you need to know what keywords your customers are searching for and how much traffic those terms can send your way. Find keywords that fit with your prospective customers’ user intent. This means contemplating why your customer would search for a keyword, what they are trying to accomplish, and what they intend to find on a page about it. Start with a broad keyword. For home builders, you could begin with a keyword like “custom home building” or “build contractors”. Research the most widespread search terms related to the custom home building industry and construct your pages and content around them. Once you have identified the keywords with good search volume but are not too difficult to rank for, you can add these words and phrases to your website. This includes page titles, body content, links and the name of the image files. Although it is imperative to incorporate your keywords throughout your website, note that ranking high on search engines won’t occur if your keywords do not fit naturally within the context of your website content. Google will penalise your page if you use this tactic; therefore, it is better in the long run if you focus on a great user experience rather than manipulating the search engine algorithm.

 

 

3. Improve User Experience

Mobile optimisation

To keep customers on your website, it is imperative to ensure your page loads quickly on not only a desktop but every device. If your home building website is not mobile-optimised or responsive, then you run the risk of losing leads. Although optimising your home builder website for mobile may require a complete redesign, with more consumers beginning to rely on their smartphones to look up information on the go, you could lose potential clients to competitors.

Web page optimisation

Did you know that most customers will bounce if your website takes more than 4 seconds to load? What this means is that potential customers come to your site and leave without engaging with your page. This can also have a significant impact on SEO. Google considers user factors such as bounce and abandon rates when ranking your site, and the higher these rates are, the lower you will rank on search engines.

 

4. Structure your SEO for local areas

With most work in the construction industry done locally, it means local SEO plays an important role. 46% of all Google searches are looking for local information. If your business isn’t optimised for local search, you could be missing out on potential customers looking for local home builders in your area.

One way to structure your home builder business for local searchers is to set up a Google My Business (GMB) page. GMB is a free service allowing businesses to list their company and provide information outlining what you do. By setting this up, when customers want to find a home builder near them, your business will appear on Google Maps for related searches.

 

5. Improve Technical SEO

To improve your site’s technical optimisation, here are some aspects you may consider:

URL Structure

HTTPS is the most used and securest version. Generally, Google will warn visitors they’re visiting non-HTTPS websites, which often deters customers from clicking on your website. HTTPS also safeguards the security of your site and makes it harder for malicious parties to intercept and tamper with your site.

Semantic Markups

Semantic markups comprise HTML tags and code you add to your website to help search engines better understand the content. It tells Google’s crawlers what the page is without reading every word, making it easier for the search engine to analyse the page.

404 Errors

Generally, home builders will have multiple pages for all listings and floorplans for each local area, making it difficult to keep track of all the pages. When someone clicks on your link or a Google search, they expect to be landing on a corresponding page. If that page is not available, the user will be shown a 404-error message, which will not positively reflect your rankings. Therefore, it is imperative to fix this by redirecting those URLs to functioning pages with content consistent with links.

Duplicate Content

Home Builders should check their site to ensure that every URL has unique content; otherwise, you may be penalised for using the same content more than once.

Image Alt Tags

Since Google can only read text, to increase your chances of ranking higher, it is worthwhile for Home Builders to name your images “floor-plan-Brisbane” than if you use standard file names such as √èMG000123″.

Backlinks

Backlinks are links from a page on one website to another. Although getting websites to link to your site may be challenging, you could start with organisations you are part of. Such as “home builder associations”. Likewise, you might reach out to architects or contractors you work with to see if they might link to your website. The more quality websites and people that link to your website, the higher your website may appear in the rankings.

These are only a few basics to improve. However, as Home Builder SEO can become complex to grasp, it may be worthwhile retaining an SEO specialist to assist you. Ultimately, SEO is crucial to the long-term success of any home builder’s website. Undoubtedly, there are aspects of SEO that are complex and difficult for any business to implement, let alone home builders. However, if you can get it right, you will see a significant difference in the overall performance of your website.