SEO for the homebuilding industry requires a combination of local, on-page, off-page and technical organic search skills to maximize your ranking potential.
The right balance of these skills and strategies for your organization is up to you:
- Targeting (region and country).
- Business type (custom vs area builder).
- The resources needed to get the job done.
- and growth goals.
While the above factors will help you personalize and tailor your SEO strategy to your unique needs, you need a solid foundation to build on (see what I did there?).
Here are four areas marketers in the home construction space should be well aware of to help your home construction company succeed in search.
1. On-Site Content Areas Required by Home Builders
Your website will have sections dedicated to prospects and customers.
Here are five areas where your website needs to invest the most for SEO success:
Floor plan or home plan page
The most popular part of a builder’s website is usually their floor plan page.
The bulk of your website investment should be spent filling these pages with images, specs, localized pricing/features, virtual walkthroughs, FAQs, and video-based content featuring a home designer or architect.
These pages should also be Optimized for mobile devices Because they may not be able to view detailed images as easily as they can on a desktop or tablet.
Community or Sales Office Pages
For home builders, your community or sales office location page is your gateway to local searches.
These pages should have community name, address, and phone number information.
Also, for area builders, each community page should include information about life in the area and a gallery of your home (with rich localized information) text description).
It would be even better if you could include a map of nearby attractions, restaurants, grocery stores and watering holes.
For custom or your lot builder, these location pages should also contain localized information for:
- build process.
- No permission required.
- Video testimonials from satisfied customers in the region.
- A gallery of houses built in the area.
- FAQ (with FAQ Timeline implemented on the page).
Featured Product Pages
Throughout the build process, builders work with a variety of suppliers and contractors.
These suppliers can have an impact on your buyer’s decision because there is a correlation between the quality of the supplier’s material and the buyer’s perception of the brand.
Home builders with clear product information on their website can use this to help ensure buyers feel confident that they are using a quality product.
These pages are helpful from both an SEO and sales process perspective.
build process
For custom home builders, buyers need to understand the long, multi-stage process of home building.
You should consider creating timeline infographics, guides, video, Or a series of articles describing this.
Much of this is usually documented in-house, but making this public-facing builder (even if it’s a bit abbreviated) will help educate and identify buyers during the sale process.
Blog content
Home builders will look from an SEO perspective, if not certain parts of their website Committed to providing home buyers with fresh educational content.
For lot or specification builders, this content should focus on the financing and selection process for an existing home.
For custom home builders, this needs to cover a wider range of topics that may include:
- Find land.
- Prepare your land.
- financing.
- Work with builders.
- Inspect the home before moving.
- and more.
2. SERP Features for Home Builders
The high level of engagement and lengthy home buying process created several opportunities to showcase several SERP features.
local package
The first steps for homebuilders to improve their local SEO presence should include optimization and Verify their Google Business Profile.
This should be done at the local office or branch level, and you need to have a profile for each (sales office or community) location.
After optimizing your GBP, you should now focus on generating 5-star reviews through a review building program, which will further help you in Local SERPs.
knowledge pack
Each of your communities (for land builders) or sales offices (for field builders) can display a personalized knowledge pack.
This knowledge pack Filled with location information (provided by your Google business profile), user-generated Q&A, reviews (from Google and 3rd parties), relevant social profiles, and more.
image pack
The highly visual nature of the new home provided the builder with the opportunity to appear in the image package.
Image packs often contain images from builder websites as well as reposted images from home building aggregators, YouTube, and local publications.
Besides high-quality photography, homebuilders need to invest Content distribution As well as a PR strategy to spread its visual creative assets across channels.
people also ask
Your team members answer many frequently asked questions about the home buying and building process for potential clients and clients.
If you have a help desk, A lot of information can be mined from there.
In any case, your website can frequently appear in the People Also Ask (PAA) SERP feature using FAQs on your website.
Furthermore, by Implement FAQ mode, you’re giving search engines a signal and giving your site the best chance of getting PAA SERP features.
Depending on your CMS, the FAQ schema is relatively easy to implement.
3. Off-site SEO opportunities
Home builders often have many low-hanging link building opportunities because they have great connections with vendors, partners, and organizations in their communities.
Here are two off-page investment opportunities.
link building
Home builders have relationships with suppliers, trading partners, suppliers, contractors, real estate agents, clients, the media and people outside the community.
The scale of these relationships is even larger when looking at national or regional homebuilders found in multiple locations.
Homebuilder marketers should create a prospect list in their CRM Link Building Opportunities And make sure you have a process of getting backlinks from every website you have a relationship with.
review building
Generate positive reviews on third-party sites Or Google is one of the most impactful off-page SEO opportunities for your team.
You should have an automated system to encourage (happy or high) as you complete projects with buyers Net Promoter Score) customers leave reviews on Google, Houzz, New Home Source, and other sites that aggregate builder reviews.
If you’re getting the most out of your CRM, you should keep track of customers who leave you a 5-star review so you can work with them to build case studies in the future, rely on them for customer reference calls or maybe sell to them again in the future.
In addition to an automated review request system, you should also incentivize your sales team to encourage the establishment of reviews.
Online reviews are valuable and you should reward your sales team (cash) if they drive customers away from online reviews.
Many review sites prohibit incentivizing your customers to leave reviews, but there are a few creative ways to make it easy for them.
4. Common SEO mistakes to avoid
The list of common SEO mistakes is long. Here are two that builders should avoid:
hidden content
Larger home builders have more sophisticated CMS capabilities that allow for more personalization and localization of content.
While this can be useful from a user experience standpoint, you need to balance it with Google’s ability to crawl your site.
If you hide certain content from users in certain places, and if Google doesn’t have any way to crawl the hidden content, you may not be able to index that content in Google.
Content Deprecation Issues
Another major mistake that is more common with Tract builders is too much Content that needs to be deprecated And redirect when all homes in the community are sold out.
When a new community is announced to the public, the new community tends to generate inbound links to the new community from local news and other sources.
301 redirect Going to the relevant category or city page will give you the best chance of preserving the link equity built on the URL.
Alternatively, you can update the page and let visitors know that the neighborhood is sold out, but they should check out the list of nearby neighborhoods provided.
in conclusion
As you can see, home builders need to excel in local and organic searches, requiring multiple skills and resources.
As competition in this space continues to intensify, builders with strong local and national SEO presence, a system to generate 5-star reviews across local channels — and most importantly, an avid fan base with happy customers — will will see the greatest success in the SERPs.
More resources:
Featured image: sculpies/Shutterstock
