Leigh Simpson
To generate website traffic, you need people to find your website on Google. To appear in the results of their searches you need to understand; what they’re looking for, what phrases they’re using and what type of content would best fit their needs.
Fundamentally, a construction keyword strategy is needed in any successful building product company's content marketing plan. Let’s explore what keyword strategy is and how it complements keyword research.
What Is A Keyword Strategy?
It’s not unusual for keyword strategy and keyword research to get mixed up. They sound similar, right?
Many people focus just on keyword research to identify what terms they should use. But that is just the start of the process.
The next steps are just as crucial: this is the keyword strategy stage.
Your keyword strategy should detail all of the actions you need to take as a result of your keyword research findings. It is about how you want to target those keywords, now and in the future.
It should cover the content you need to write and how you’re going to track the results and then close the loop with insights fed back into your next phase of keyword research.
To get started, you need to consider three factors carefully:
- your business
- your products
- your competitors
Construction Keyword Strategy & Your Business
Keyword strategy starts with you and your business and understanding your vision.
What is the function of your business and why do you do it? What are your vision, mission and goals? What makes you different, your USP? What message do you want to convey? What does your brand represent? Why should anyone care? What value do you offer to your customers and what pain do you resolve?
In-depth insights provide a clear pathway to helping you achieve your goals. Sometimes these answers aren't obvious right away but the insight of other team members and stakeholders can help provide a different perspective.
Using Product Search for Keyword Strategy
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After you’ve documented where you want to get to and why; it’s time to look at how you're going to get there. Search intent is the why behind the potential customer's search that should lead them to your website.
You should be asking yourself or your Sales and Marketing team: How well do you know your ideal customers? What is driving them to search for the outcomes your product can offer? Remember, people don’t buy products, they buy solutions to problems.
Select one of the keywords that your research has thrown up and then ask yourself - will the visitors searching this keyword be looking to research, specify or buy, when they reach your website?
Think about what sort of content you need to create to match their search queries and influence them to engage with you. Creating content that solves the problem they have means you're matching their search intent not just their search query.
Construction Keyword Strategy & Your Competitors
While producing your keyword strategy, you need to look hard at your competitors. What are they up to? Where are they currently ranking for the keywords that you’d like to improve on or start ranking for? What types of content do they have? How can you improve on what is working for them? Is targeting long-tail keywords a better strategy for you?
At the same time, look at how the SERP (search engine results page) is showing your competitor's content or other features that appear for a particular keyword. Are there featured snippets you could target? Are they ranking highly for images or other search features? Are there People Also Ask questions that you could answer? Click the top5 organic results and see what page type is ranking. Are they product pages? Blogs? Homepages? Video Content?
Don't neglect the paid results. If the organic results are highly competitive for a crucial keyword then you could set aside some budget to promote paid Ads.
Using data in your construction keyword strategy
If you’re monitoring your results on tools such as Google Analytics, Ahrefs, Moz or HubSpot, you’ll have access to a significant amount of useful but potentially confusing data.
Analysing it frequently and carefully plays a major part in the success of your construction keyword strategy.
Google Analytics provides useful insights into how your site is performing, and Google Search Console provides deeper insights into the keywords that are triggering an appearance of your website in search. Software such as Ahrefs can help you to find the right keywords for your business and prioritise the ones which will have the biggest impact.
Developing Your Content for your Construction Keyword Strategy
The construction industry is perfect for content marketing to flourish. It’s an information-hungry environment, and because most building product's businesses don’t do a great job at sharing their technical data, you can make big advances by being open and more helpful than your competitors.
Our own research highlighted that 83% of building product websites were missing key technical data for specifier's to download.
If you’ve run through all the steps we’ve described above and conducted thorough keyword research, you should have a good idea of what you should target and how you should do it.
Here are a few ideas of the sort of content you can produce;
- Whitepapers
- Landing Pages
- Specification Clauses
- General Arrangement (GA) Drawings
- BIM Objects
- Case Studies
- CPD Presentations (why not record them and upload them to YouTube?)
- Webinars
- Podcasts
- And, don’t forget regular blog posts!
Keeping your construction marketing strategy Up To Date
The internet is a competitive space and very dynamic. There’s always a lot that can happen and your keyword strategy should take that into account.
Review your keyword strategy frequently, at least every 6 months. And monitor your priority keywords monthly so you can react to changes in the SERP.
Have there been any significant changes in your market that need to be factored in? New regulations and standards, new solutions, new technology, new competitors? Keep an eye on things and tweak where necessary!
Conclusion
While keyword research is technically challenging, distilling this down into an actionable and meaningful strategy is complicated.
Done well, it can provide real focus and clarity to your content creation plan, which will yield results for years to come.
If you need advice or help in formulating your keyword strategy, please get in touch. We have tonnes of experience of creating and delivering keyword strategies as part of your wider content marketing activity. We’re always happy to help.
About Insynth
As the only HubSpot certified agency to major on construction marketing, we bring together construction marketing strategy, digital strategy, website design, SEO, content marketing, email marketing, sales automation, marketing automation and HubSpot CRM implementation to produce successful campaigns and great results for our clients.