These days any kind of business needs to have an online presence in order to be successful and attract new customers on a regular basis.

Years ago people used to rely on phone books with business listings but that is rapidly becoming a dying tactic as more and more people start to use the Internet for just about everything.

If a potential client needs some construction work done then they will go to Google and do a search. If your website does not come up on the first page of the results that show up in Google, you may as well not be there at all.

In this article I’ll go over some of the basics that you need to have in place to ensure that you get found.

1) Optimize Your Website

The very first place to start is your website itself. There are a few important components that you need to get right:

Your Brand – Google loves brands and you want to make it clear what yours is. The home page of your site should have your brand name in it and it should be apparent what your brand is as soon as somebody lands on the page.

Areas Served – unless you run a national agency, your business probably covers a specific set of cities / metro areas. You should have a single page for your areas served but then build out a separate page for each individual city. This makes it easy for Google to serve up the correct page when somebody is looking for a service in that city.

Services – You also need to make it crystal clear what services you offer. You could have a single page that lists everything you do but you might do better in Google if you have a separate page for each service. Put lots of information about that service, including examples of your work on each of those pages. Google loves relevant content.

2) Relevant Business Listings

Your website is not enough. For business sites in particular you now need to make sure that your business is listed in all the prominent directories. The most important one is Google’s business directory.

Then depending on your country you will have very large directories such as Yell or Yelp. These are broad directories that cover all types of businesses but you need to take it a step further and start to go specific.

Look for directories that are specific to the construction industries such as Construction Links and BuilderSpace.

After that, you also need to look for directories for your local area. What Google is looking for is relevance – both in terms of the services you offer and the areas in which you operate. By having listings in directories that are specific to both your industry and your location, you build relevancy in both of these areas.

3) Social Media

As somebody who works in construction, I’m willing to bet you don’t spend a whole lot of time on Facebook or Twitter! However, these things are important for marketing because Google now uses social signals as a very important ranking factor.

There are a ton of social platforms these days and it’s not practical to be on all of them but you should pick at least 2-3 and encourage your clients to connect with you on those platforms.

Post content on a regular basis – photographs of your projects is great content, and encourage your followers to engage by liking, sharing and commenting on your content.

Conclusion

These three aspects will be a great start to getting your construction company seen in Google. If you do not want to do this yourself or you want help in climbing higher up in the rankings once you have the basics covered then I’d suggest hiring an seo company to do the work for y