One of the best achievements in online marketing is to bring in more high-quality sales leads at a lower cost. Search engine optimization (SEO), when done right, can accomplish that goal.
There are several reasons why SEO is an essential lead gen channel for building materials manufacturers:
- It’s easily responsible for 60-90% of all consumer web traffic across the industry, and accounts for site visitor counts that would be wildly expensive to produce through paid advertising alone.
- It converts traffic at the highest rate of all digital marketing tactics, since it reaches people actively looking for your products or the solutions they provide.
- It’s more sustainable than any other traffic channel, since it yields lower costs per lead and an ever-increasing return on investment in the long haul.
We reached out to Matt Lee from Lead Generation Experts with the question, What are the 4 most overlooked SEO strategies for building material manufacturers?
Here, we’ll share his responses. Take advantage of these quickly-implementable ideas to see more results from your SEO building materials marketing strategy:
1. Get Keyword Ideas From Your Sales Inquiries
When revamping your SEO strategy, it’s important to keep in mind what you’re aiming for in the long run: your website being listed near the top when real people look up products and solutions with Google.
Often, building materials manufacturers are inclined to write content around just 2-3 short competitive SEO keyphrases. This is often not enough to capture the “long tail keywords” many high-intent searchers are using. Research gathered by Moz shows the average searcher uses about 3 words in search queries, with desktop users often using 6 words or more.
You can boost your SEO results just by building articles and web pages around the real everyday questions your prospects are asking, with special attention to their word choice. Some great places to look for these keyphrases are the online inquiries you receive from prospective customers.
For example, this screenshot shows a prospect asking a siding manufacturer whether a few different exterior finishes are available:
Take a closer look at the homeowner’s comments. It’s not too hard to spot a number of terms that could make for effective SEO keyphrases:
- real wood design element
- real wood contemporary exterior
- bug resistant siding
- rot resistant exterior
- weather resistant wood siding
Why are sales inquiries like these so valuable? They’re the actual words of your prospective customers.
You’ll want to look at multiple sales inquiries and keep a log of phrases and keywords that keep showing up, and write articles and blog posts around them. By doing so, you’ll position your site to attract many more prospects with similar thoughts, questions, and needs.
2. Gather More Keywords From Forums, Blog Comment Sections, and Product Reviews
Sales inquiries are just one source of keyword ideas from prospects. Soon enough, you’ll need more ideas.
You’re in luck. There are more keyword sources than you might have imagined, and it just takes a little ingenuity to discover them.
Other good places to look are forums, product reviews, and the comment sections at the end of blog posts. These are all fantastic places to mine keywords because customers will be speaking in their natural, everyday “language” to describe issues or projects they need help with.
That’s the same language they’re likely using in their Google searches, too.
Forums
In forums, homeowners and other prospects often speak their mind or ask burning questions about the products they need.
Your professional customers such as dealers and installers will also gather in online forums to discuss the building materials they sell and use, along with other business concerns. These “pro” forums can be a goldmine of SEO keywords especially if you want to reach new potential local partners with authoritative content.
Here’s an example forum discussion about the benefits and drawbacks of different kinds of siding:
Some of the keywords to pick out from the above might include simulated stucco siding, vinyl vs. fiber cement siding cost, and fiber cement siding durability.
If you’re creating content to appeal to professional customers, you can use keywords like these in articles that speak to the relevant advantages of your brand’s products over the competition.
Blog Comment Sections
There are 77 million blog comments being generated by web users each month, and the comments readers leave at the end of blog posts are an often-overlooked source of promising keywords.
This is especially the case if your online branding focuses more on your business-to-consumer (B2C) operations that target homeowners and other end consumers. These web users often employ less-sophisticated words, so look for them to use terms and phrases that don’t exactly describe your products with pinpoint accuracy.
It’s those exact phrases, however, that you’ll want to use in the blog posts and articles you write.
For example, here’s a comment section with some remarks about flooring options:
Keyword ideas you might glean from this example include all-natural flooring, tiles for concrete floors, slip resistant floors, and termite resistant floors.
Customer Reviews
Yet another great source of SEO keywords is customer reviews. Just as in forums, some of the words used will accurately reflect industry vernacular. Like with blog comment sections, however, you’ll also find layperson’s terms to describe building products.
For this reason, reviews harbor a nice mix of keywords you can target both professionals and end consumers with. Here’s an example:
The first review is from a buyer with installation experience, and the second is from a consumer with few words. As this shows, it might take some digging to find in-depth reviews that are rich with possible SEO keywords. The search is well worth the effort.
3. Ask Influencers to Write Guest Posts For Your Blog
When it comes to content, more is always better. Improving your website’s ranking in Google can be as simple as adding more content, as long as you can guarantee the quality will remain high.
The caveat? Producing content often costs both time and money. A foolproof way around this is guest posting.
This entails someone of influence outside of your company writing an article for your site, in exchange for a link back to their own site. Both parties win in this scenario.
You’ll get free content (and possibly exposure to the author’s audience), and the writer will get a pertinent link to their site, which improves their SEO prospects. Stats gathered by Adsy show that guest blogging can lead to an 80% increase in organic and referral traffic, so this is a strategy not to be ignored.
When considering possible guest authors, consider people in the following categories:
- Thought leaders from popular building materials-related publications or blogs
- Individual influencers with lots of social media followers
- Professional customers such as architects, installers, distributors, retailers, and suppliers
- Technical experts
- Building product marketing and sales experts
The highest-profile influencers may only want to guest post on blogs that already have a large following of their own. This can be a challenge if your blog isn’t yet on most consumers’ radars, but this can be remedied with time.
Focus on building up your blog with high-quality original content for the first couple of years. Then, once you’ve built domain authority and gained regular readership, start inviting potential guest bloggers to create new content for you.
4. Expand the Formats and Geographical Focus of Your Content
With content strategy, it’s important to think “bigger” to keep generating fresh ideas that will appeal to more potential customers.
One way to do this is to create more types of content.
Bear in mind that “content” goes far beyond just written articles: it can also include YouTube videos, project images, infographics, and podcasts. You’ll want your brand’s voice represented in as many of these forms as possible. It’s smart to infuse your text-based content with these kinds of multimedia elements as well.
As long as you use high-intent keywords wherever the content appears, and your on-page SEO is solid, you’ll generate more organic consumer traffic to your site.
The second content-expanding strategy is to focus on geographical areas. Specifically, go local.
Increasing numbers of consumers are looking for nearby retail options when using Google. As recently as 2020, 93% of shoppers used online searches to look up local businesses. Here’s where your building materials brand can gain the advantage.
Create more local SEO content that appeals to buyers wherever your products are sold. For example, if you provide roofing materials and installations in Baltimore, MD, it might be a good idea to create content around keywords like roofing supply Baltimore and roof installers in Baltimore.
This will help your brand show up when local consumers Google products they need. Combine that with other forms of online media, and your organic reach will outpace your less SEO-savvy competitors.
Your Building Materials Brand Can Enjoy SEO Success By Using a Few Smart Tactics
Great SEO is an ongoing project. You can easily get stuck, however, doing the same things repeatedly and not seeing a huge difference in results.
It’s easy to correct course by following some of the above tips. Use your customers’ own words as a foundation for your keyword research, leverage guest posting, and open up your strategy to focus on local areas and different types of media, and you should see a positive shift.
You can take your results to the next level with the #1 dealer locator software built with digital marketing and SEO in mind: Bullseye Locations.
Bullseye can allow you to connect the organic traffic you receive from solid SEO to hundreds or thousands of local dealers and contractors — while supporting your SEO strategy in the first place by dynamically creating hundreds of local search-optimized pages that appeal to buyers.
Still curious about how Bullseye perfectly pairs with a well-thought-out SEO approach? Schedule your demo today to find out!