If you’re a contractor, the benefits of developing a new website far outweigh the risks. Once you get everything up and running, it doesn’t take much tinkering to see results and post original content on a schedule.
The keyword here is original. Unless you provide potential customers with valuable information on a professional-looking website, you’ll have a far more difficult time maintaining credibility and strengthening your brand online.
Ultimately, you can learn to use blog posts to your advantage, but the real work begins after you launch a website because, without great content, no one can find you online.
So, the question becomes: what do you need to attract an audience to your website? The answer is to use the power of SEO content writing to distinguish yourself from the competition.
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A Quick Introduction to SEO Basics
SEO stands for search engine optimization, and the trick is that it’s an activity, something you have to do constantly to grow a website.
Search engines like Google and Bing essentially index the entire internet and display the results based on keywords or keyword phrases. The idea is to make it easier and faster for anyone to find reliable, trustworthy information online.
From a contractor’s point of view, that’s a fantastic opportunity because building trust is a huge factor when homeowners choose a remodeling contractor.
Along those lines, there are two ways you can do SEO: organic SEO and paid SEO.
When you type a keyword into Google, the algorithm will show results for the most relevant websites containing the keyword or covering the topic. After all, you may not know that you can pay to have your content ranked above the natural, “organic” results.
Without a doubt, paid SEO mainly works well for established websites, but organic search is where you can make the most headway for the lowest cost if you’re a contractor.
The bottom line is that you don’t necessarily have to pay a dime to rank highly on Google. If the software algorithm likes your web content, Google will add it to the top of its search results for a particular keyword or phrase.
How does SEO Work, and Why is it Necessary?
Out of all things you could initially do, making an SEO plan is the most vital part of building an excellent website for contractors.
Google and Bing work wonders when it comes to ranking content, but it’s not as easy as they make it look. Imagine the difficulty of organizing millions of websites at once, most of which don’t have the best coding, grammar, or spelling.
Although search engines have come a long way in recent times, the algorithms still aren’t as accurate as software engineers would like.
So, SEO is what helps search engines find content and rank it according to the website’s quality, especially its value to the reader – the target customer who’ll eventually hire your services.
Google’s algorithm scans every word and phrase on a website, including the underlying layers of code, and determines whether or not the information on the site is useful.
The good news is that you don’t have to make a perfectly coded website to earn high rankings in organic search results.
That’s the entire point of Google’s algorithm because the vast majority of content isn’t going to be perfect, and it’s common to see high-ranking sites rife with “SEO mistakes” outperforming so-called professional websites.
But how is that possible? The answer is effective copywriting, which is a separate discipline from ordinary article writing!
What is SEO Content writing?
Also known as SEO copywriting, this form of writing bridges the information gap between businesses and potential customers. Google both needs and wants to display the right results to the right people, and that’s where copywriting comes into play.
More importantly, always keep in mind that copywriting is not the same thing as paid advertising services.
Copywriters excel at connecting with a business’s customers, speaking to that audience on their terms based on a reader’s attitudes, beliefs, and needs.
The rudimentary, decades-old SEO playbook is to create a website and “sprinkle in” target keywords in the site’s coding, headers, images, and landing page content.
Unfortunately, this strategy doesn’t work, if it ever did at all.
You have to provide value to the reader to rank highly on Google, and you absolutely cannot have a blatant overtly financial motivation.
That’s where a great copywriter can be worth their weight in gold because it’s incredibly challenging for a contractor to run a business and keep pace with the latest SEO techniques.
A perfect example is how the ideal placement of keywords has changed over the last five years or so.
Previously, it was standard practice to place the keyword in the opening sentence, but that’s no longer the case. Nowadays, you’ll fare better by strategically putting the keyword throughout the article, especially in the lead sentences after sub-headings or transitional phrases.
Without an SEO copywriter developing the content, the risk is that the website won’t appeal to the right customers at all, or worse – never see the light of day on Google search results.
That said, here are the main strategic benefits of SEO copywriting.
Strategic Benefits of SEO Copywriting
All it takes is one negative review to make potential customers think twice about hiring you, and regularly posting website content on your website is how you balance the good with the bad.
Ranking content allows you to promote your expertise, professionalism, and business savvy since customers will appreciate how easy it is to use your website and book a follow-up.
A professional copywriter knows how to distill your value proposition down to the basics and communicate that message to your potential customers. It could be a teaser, a word of advice, or an invitation to learn more.
Either way, the goal is to increase the number of leads, referrals, and paying customers you receive from online sources to build credibility.
In the end, if you build a website with great SEO copywriting, you’ll be able to leverage the power of Google to grow your business like no other.
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