How to get your website for your trade or property business found

What marketing do I need to do to get my website found

Following on from my last post about building your own website there are a number of things you need to be doing and I mean need to do, to get your website seen, that's what I'm going to be covering in this post, I'm going to be talking about Search Engine Optimisation or SEO for short!

What the hell is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

When someone searches for a building trade or property business on a search engines, they use keywords such as Builder in, Electrician in, Interior Designer in or Architect in..... (add your local area here) this is just a very basic set of keywords and it is different for different businesses.

SEO is about designing your website so that when someone searches for your keyword terms, it is deemed worthy enough to be shown to the potential customer in search results!

SEO is adding the right words to your website and online marketing for your business for your building trade or property business, generally though if you add enough pages to your website this will happen naturally.

What are my marketing keywords

The first place to start with SEO is deciding on your marketing keywords, the best thing to do is grab some paper and brainstorm all of the words that someone may type into a search engine to find your business, as I'm an ex sparks, lets go with keywords for an electrician or electrical contractor.

First off we'll start with Electrician in..(your area)
Then you could have:

• electrical rewire 
• electrical rewiring
• electrical fault
• electrical testing
• electrical fuseboard (I know its a consumer unit, but people still call it a fuseboard)
• electrician rewire (People search this way)
• rewire house
• electrician prices
• good electrician
• lights not working

This is a tiny list your list could be very long perhaps pages but you get the idea. If you're an electrician these are your marketing keywords you need to think about having on your website. 
You can then use the Google Adwords Keword Tool which will soon be Google Keyword Planner to find more keywords, you can add competitors websites to the keyword tool to see which keywords they use too.

Google keyword tool will also suggest keywords related to your industry.

Something else the keyword tool will tell you is how much competition there is for that word on a high, medium and low basis, so out of that list above as you can imagine 'electrician' is high, 'rewire house' is medium, however 'how much does it cost to rewire a house' has low competition.

The competition is on the basis of Google Pay Per Click campaign, if you use PPC as part your construction business marketing plan then the medium and low keywords are the ones you want to think about going for as it will cost less!

However in SEO marketing on your website you want to have a mix of all of them!

What you need to add for SEO marketing

The key thing for SEO, and if there is only one key thing you take from this post it's CONTENT, content is a big thing for Google search right now and it's the best way to spread your keywords out, the best way to have content is to have a separate page for all of your services not one service page with a list.

On top of this search engines love sites that are current and constantly changing, I would add a new page to your site every week, this is why I'm a fan of building your own site, as with a website designer this can become very costly very quickly.


Make sure your keywords are in the titles of pages, headings and sub headings and throughout the page itself, so on this page in the post title I have website, trade and property business in the title, in the heading and sub headings I have Marketing, keywords and SEO along with keywords in the labels. 

Have your Keywords in your URL is a big help so even if you are a plumbing business called Quick Install ltd it's best to have a URL/domain called www.YourAreaPlumbing.co.uk or www.PlumbersInYourArea.co.uk you can search for your domain at 123-reg.co.uk

When you add images make sure that it has what is called an ALT tag, this is for 2 reasons, if the image doesn't load then people can get an idea what it is, but also search engines can't see images and so read the ALT tag.

Get good backlinks a backlink is simply a link to your website from another website, just any back link is no good, so if someone calls you asking for what is known as a reciprocal link turn it down as it'll probably be no good to your websites SEO, you need links from high ranking and quality websites and sites that have content based on your industry. 

What doesn't work

Links from forums or blog comments and link building sites, most forum sites, blog comments etc seem to attract people adding links to boost their SEO, this does not work because they generally have a 'No follow' attribute which tells search engines not to follow links, so this is a waste of time and as for things like link building sites, well Google just ignores those apparently it does the same with most directory sites!

Lots of Keywords repeated numerous times (known as keyword stuffing) on a page is also does not work and can be seen as spam by search engines and can harm your search engine results, It's best to only use your keywords 2-5 times per page.

The same goes for having every area and/or postcode that you cover listed on your website and to be honest it looks messy! It's much better to have testimonials on the site with the customers area listed.

Submitting URL to search engines you domain such as www.HertfordElectrician.co.uk is your URL and you used to have to submit these to search engines for them to be found, that has changed today search engines are a lot better and this no longer needs to be done however I would submit your site to www.dmoz.org

Human SEO mix

When adding all of this to your website you need to keep one key thing in mind and that is people will be looking at your website for your service, so it needs to be readable and make sense otherwise those people that come to your site will just leave!


There is so much more to SEO than this and I'll cover a bit more in the next post, I'll try and make it a bit shorter too! even then there is more to it, however if you do just these basic things, you'll be ahead of most of your competition in your area. 
But remember that it's an ongoing process, you can't build your site and expect to be found over night, you've got to be found by search engines and then your site has to 'prove' itself against your competitors. The whole process can take months but it is worth it in the end!



To your SEO success

Paul Jennings