SEO for Contractors: 5 Tips to Capture Off-Season Sales

When colder weather arrives, homeowners tend to pause their home improvement plans until the spring to focus on travel. This is why many people don't hire construction services during the winter months.  

Fortunately, there are things you can do to keep your business leads strong during the off-season.  

By having a well-planned SEO strategy for contractors and executing it ahead of time, you can achieve good positions in the SERPs. This allows you to capture home improvement queries during the winter months, just as holiday-related home improvement search volume spikes.

The earlier you can start to optimize for holiday SEO for contractors, the better your chances of ranking high for relevant keywords and bringing in enough leads to fill your schedule during the off-season.  

5 SEO Tips for Contractors to Boost Business During Off Season

The last thing you want to do during a busy period is to hibernate and lose visibility online. To help your construction business make the most out of the off-peak season, we’ve compiled holiday SEO best practices to promote your company during the holidays.  

1. Ensure Your Site is Functioning Well and Ranking High

The first thing you need to do is ensure that your site is functioning well, and that search engines can find, crawl, and index your site. Otherwise, you can’t show up in front of your target customers when they search for your construction services online.

To do this, analyze your analytics to identify pages that are already performing well and pages that need improvement.  

You don’t need to do anything to your top-performing pages. However, you do need to work on optimizing the pages that aren’t helping you bring in leads.

There are three Contractor SEO audits you need to do to be able to create actionable plans that will help you outperform your competitors, create better customer experiences, and identify opportunities within your site:

• Technical SEO audits – Allows you to ensure that your site is easy to navigate and loads quickly so users can stay on your website longer.  
• On-page SEO audits – Lets you optimize the actual content on your page by using relevant keywords, alt text on images, and other best practices to boost its visibility for relevant queries.  
• Off-page SEO audits – Involves building backlinks, having an active presence on social media, blogging for other quality websites, and all other actions you do outside of your site to boost your ranking.  

As you go through your SEO audit, you’ll discover areas you can further optimize to increase your site performance and provide a delightful user experience to your web visitors.  

2. Identify Popular Holiday Keywords in Your Industry

Once your site is up and running, it's time to do keyword research to determine what your ideal clients are looking up on the web to find your construction services during this time of the year.

It’s important to target the right keyword in your content to capture consistent, quality traffic to your site.

You can do social media listening to find out what people are talking about that’s relevant to your industry. You can also use Google Trends, Google Keyword Planner, and SEMRush to get an insight into the terms you should be going for during the holiday season.  

Below are some tips on finding the right holiday construction keywords:

• Create holiday-focused keywords.  
• Identify keywords that can boost revenue and traffic.  
• Determine which keywords have a high monthly search volume. Analyze historical competitive data to know which keywords your competitors are ranking for and areas of opportunities you can penetrate.
• Track terms around holiday deals, packages, and discounts in the construction industry.

Now that you have a list of popular holiday keywords, it’s time to refine them. As much as possible, avoid high-traffic and high-competition keywords because they’re difficult to rank for.

You want to focus on long-tail keywords instead. They generate enough traffic to sustain your business but don't have much competition.  

For example, instead of targeting the keyword “contractor,” go for something more specific like “the best contractor in West Palm Beach.” Add adjectives to your keywords that best describe your company and refine it even more by localizing it.

By doing your research in advance, you can get a head start in building an SEO strategy that is focused on these trending keywords and securing a top spot in the search results.  

3. Publish Content Around Holiday House Improvement Projects

Once you have a set of keywords, it’s time to publish content around them. By creating blog posts, videos, and social media content, you can easily reach potential clients.  

Here are some tips to keep in mind when creating holiday content:

• Showcase your best holiday deals. Think about the specific services or products you want to promote during the holidays. You can offer a kitchen remodel package for the holidays, a discount on roofing repairs, and many more.  
• Write evergreen content about holiday construction. High-quality blogs are a great way of showing your expertise in the field. Give your audience value by providing them with informational content that they will find helpful in home improvement projects. You can also discuss why it’s best to tackle home improvement projects during the holidays.
• Be authentic. You want every piece of content you put out on the web to be authentic. It’s important to humanize your construction business because it’ll be easier to connect with your target clients. Develop a messaging that's aligned with your brand and make sure to incorporate that in every piece of content you publish.

• Optimize your content for SEO for contractors. You want your blogs, social media posts, and videos to show up when people search for your products and services online. Make sure to use hashtags and keywords, as well as applying on-page best practices to boost your content's visibility online.  
• Explore TikTok. TikTok’s algorithm enables you to widen your reach. It can also help you go viral overnight. Explore making content on TikTok. It’s a great way to show your knowledge and expertise in construction and helps you build a good reputation. You can even generate leads through the platform.  
• Promote your content on social media. To drive more people to your site, make sure you promote your blogs and videos via social media, email, and other channels. Encourage your followers to share your content with friends and family too!

4. Create a New Landing Page for The Holidays

Set up new, holiday-specific pages to promote your holiday deals, discounts, and service packages. This is a great way to drive more traffic to your site.  

Want to know the secret to building the perfect holiday landing page? Here are some best practices to follow:

• Keep your design simple to avoid distracting visitors and keep them focused on converting. Get rid of the header and footer full of links. Doing this can boost your conversions up to 28%!
• Use FOMO to create a sense of urgency and convince clients to purchase your services NOW.
• Incorporate your keywords in your landing page title, copy, and description.  
• Use one image that will help draw a visitor's attention toward the call-to-action button.

• Leverage social proof to build trust and win over clients.

If you don’t have the time and resources to develop various holiday landing pages, look at other relevant pages you can optimize for holiday keywords like deal pages.  

Optimize your deal pages by incorporating your targeted holiday keywords into their titles, descriptions, headings, and body copy.  

5. Update Your Local Listings

Another way to boost your visibility in the search results is to update your Google My Business listings, Best Places, Yext, and other listings.  

Make sure you indicate the deals you're having, update your operating hours and wish people a happy holiday message.  

Here are five important local listing optimizations for the holiday season:

• Get rid of any duplicate listings.
• Update your office hours for the holidays.
• Upload holiday-themed images and relevant construction projects.

• Keep your clients happy to motivate them to leave reviews and rate your business.
• Audit your Google Map Pins to make sure it’s accurate with your actual location.  

Make the Most Out of the Off-Season with SEO for Contractors!

Keep your business leads strong during the off-season by creating a well-planned, holiday SEO strategy for contractors!

SEO is a long-term strategy, and it takes time before you can experience its full effect. Get optimizing now to boost your visibility in time for the holidays!

At Digital Resource, our contractor SEO specialist will work with you to create a custom SEO plan to put your business in front of potential clients and attract them to your business.  

Need help building a solid SEO strategy that will grow your business beyond the holiday season? Contact us today!

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