To maximise your ranking potential in the homebuilding industry, homebuilders need a mix of local, on-page, off-page and technical organic search expertise. The right balance of these skills and tactics for your organisation depends on:
- Choosing your target market – is it regional or national?
- Determining the type of business – is it custom or tract builders?
- The availability of resources to complete the job.
- Goals for growth.
While the above factors will help you customise and tailor your SEO strategy to your unique needs, you need a solid foundation to build from. Here are four areas marketers in the homebuilding space should be well aware of to help your residential construction company succeed in search.
1. Homebuilders need onsite content areas
You need to create parts on our website dedicated to prospects and existing customers. Here are five areas your site needs to invest the most in for SEO success:
Pages of a floorplan or a house plan
Floorplan pages often become the most popular section of a builder’s website. The majority of your website’s budget should be spent on these pages, including pictures, specifications, localised pricing/features, virtual walkthroughs, FAQs and video-based content showcasing the home designer or architect. These pages should also be optimised for mobile devices as they may not be able to easily see detailed imagery as well as you could on a desktop or tablet.
Pages of the community or the sales office
Your community or sales office location sites are your gateways to appearing in the local search for homebuilders. These pages should have a community name, address and contact number.
In addition, each community page for tract builders should include information about what it’s like to live in the region as well as a gallery of your houses (with rich, localised text descriptions). Even better if you can include a map with nearby attractions, restaurants, grocery stores and watering holes. For custom or on your lot builders, these location pages should also have localised information about:
- The construction process.
- Any permits required.
- Video testimonials from satisfied customers in the surrounding area.
- A gallery of houses was constructed in the region.
- Frequently asked questions (using the FAQ schema on the page).
Pages of featured products
Throughout the construction process, builders work with a range of vendors and contractors. These vendors impact your buyer’s decision because there is an association of the quality of the vendors’ material with the buyer’s perception of the brand.
Homebuilders who have detailed product information on their websites can utilise this to their advantage in ensuring that buyers have confidence in their purchases because they are using high-quality products. These pages help both from an SEO and a sales process perspective.
Pages of the building process
Buyers need to understand the lengthy, multi-phase process of homebuilding for custom home builders. It would be best if you considered creating a timeline infographic, guide, videos or a series of articles that describe this. Most of this content is usually documented internally. But, builders who can make this public-facing (even somewhat abbreviated) will help educate and qualify buyers during the sales process.
Pages of blog content
Without a section of their website dedicated to fresh and educational content for home buyers, homebuilders will struggle with SEO.
Why is SEO complicated?
With the most significant statistics, images and actionable advice, our web expert provides you with a transparent analysis of your website’s performance. For tract or spec builders, this content should focus on the financing and selection process of the existing home. For custom home builders, this needs to speak to a broader range of topics could include:
- Discovering a land.
- Get your land ready.
- Financing.
- Working with homebuilders.
- Inspect the house before move-in.
- And so on.
2. Features of the SERPs for homebuilders
The high level of participation and the length of time it takes to buy a house cause multiple opportunities for various SERP features to appear.
Local SEO
The first step for homebuilders to improve their local SEO presence should be to optimise and check their Google Business Profile (s). This should be done at the local office or branch level, and you will need to build out a profile for each (sales office or community) location. After optimising your GBP, you should now focus on generating 5-star reviews through a review-building program, which will further help you rise in the local SERPs.
Informative pack
Each of your communities (for tract builders) or sales offices (for on-your-lot builders) can have a personalised informational pack delivered to them. The informative pack is chock full of location information (supplied by your Google Business Profile), user-generated Q&As, reviews (from Google and 3rd party), associated social profiles and more.
Photo pack
Builders can benefit from the highly visual nature of new homes by appearing in photo packs. Photo packs typically contain photos from the builder’s website and reshared photos from home building aggregators, YouTube and local publications. Along with high-quality photography, homebuilders need to invest in content distribution and PR strategy to disseminate their creative visual assets across channels.
FAQ
Your team members have answered dozens of frequently asked questions regarding prospects and customers’ house purchasing and building process. If you have a support desk, you can get a lot of this information from there. In any case, your website can show up frequently within the People Also Ask (PAA) SERP feature using FAQs on your site. Further, by implementing FAQ schema, you signal search engines and give your site the best shot at gaining the PAA SERP feature. FAQ schema is relatively easy to implement depending on your CMS.
3. Opportunities for off-page SEO
Homebuilders typically have a lot of low-hanging link-building opportunities, given they are well connected with vendors, partners and organisations in the community. Here are two off-page opportunities to invest in.
Build link
Suppliers, trade partners, vendors, contractors, realtors, customers, the media and others in the community all have relationships with home builders. The volume of these relationships scales even more broadly when looking at national or regional homebuilders found in multiple locations. Marketers for homebuilders should create a list in their CRM of potential link building opportunities and ensure there is a process to gaining a backlink from every website you have a relationship with.
Create review
Positive reviews on third-party sites or Google are among your team’s most powerful off-page SEO options. As you complete projects with buyers, you should have an automated system for outreach to encourage (happy or high Net Promoter Score) customers to leave reviews on Google, social media and other sites that aggregate builder reviews.
If you’re making the most of your CRM, you should keep track of the customers who gave you 5-star ratings so you can work on case studies with them in the future, rely on them for customer reference calls, or potentially sell to them again. Along with an automated review request system, you should incentivise your sales team to encourage review building, as well.
Online reviews are priceless, and you should compensate your sales team (with money) if they were the ones who persuaded the customer to submit an online review. Many review sites prohibit incentivising your customers to leave reviews, but several creative ways make it easy for them.
4. Avoid these SEO common mistakes
The list of frequent SEO blunders is long. Here are two that builders should avoid:
Invisible content
Larger homebuilders employ more advanced CMS functionality that enables more content personalisation and localisation. Though this can be useful from a UX perspective, you need to balance this with Google’s ability to crawl your site. If you are hiding specific content from users in certain locations and Google doesn’t have any means to crawl this hidden content, you risk not having that content indexed in Google.
Issues with content deprecation
When all of the homes in a community have been sold out, a big problem that is more typical with tract builders is having an overwhelming amount of content that needs to be deprecated and redirected. When new communities are introduced to the public, they are likely to generate inbound links from local news and other sources. Redirection to a relevant category or city page will give you the best opportunity at retaining link equity built up at the URL. Alternately, you can update the page and let the visitor know the community is sold out but that they should look at the provided list of nearby communities.
Final takeaways
As mentioned, homebuilders require a wide range of skills and resources to stand out in local and organic searches. As the competition in this space continues to grow, builders who have a solid local and national SEO presence, a system for generating 5-star reviews across local channels, and most importantly, a raving fan base of happy customers will see tremendous success in the SERPs.
Optimising content and SEO is complicated for homebuilders, mainly because you have to handle your business. Top4 Marketing offers you our professional content marketing service, providing high-quality and SEO-friendly content. What’s more, with our expertise in local SEO, we can help your business strive to get more local customers. Contact us to manage your content and increase your visibility!
To find out how we can help you with your Website + Marketing, using our unique location marketing platform called Top4, get in touch today at www.top4marketing.com
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