One of the most competitive industries in the world is construction, making it one of the most difficult to rank well for on search engines, especially on Google. There’s so many businesses striving to achieve the top rankings for high search intent keywords, so you need to find ways to get ahead of the game and make Google consider your website worth ranking highly.
Their websites for construction websites are often slow and have content that is generic, which can stall growth and make search engines think that you aren’t valuable. These types of websites struggle to feel local, which can put potential clients off purchasing or hiring from you. That’s why it’s important to tweak your website design to have the local feel while having content that shows Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness (EEAT).
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This guide will explore how you can rank above construction giants with good website design despite it being a highly competitive industry. Continue reading to find out more.
Website Designs That Will Boost Rankings
Hyper-Local Service Pages
To appeal to local customers, you must avoid using generic keywords like “commercial construction” to hyper-local service and location combinations. You can design dedicated landing pages for every specific town or neighbourhood you serve, such as accessing plant hire in specific areas like Manchester or Leeds. This allows you to capitalise on Google’s preference for proximity and regional relevance.
While a national firm’s homepage struggles to appear in specific location searches, your localised pages can feature specific community landmarks, local planning expertise and neighborhood architectural styles. This creates a level of geographic authority that search engines prioritise and local clients trust.
Core Web Vitals
Website speed is your ultimate competitive edge, as while massive corporate websites are often let down with unoptimised legacy code, a leaner website can outmaneuver them in Google’s rankings. Core Web Vitals help you gain a massive advantage. If your website loads in under two seconds while a giant competitor takes five, Google will consistently favour yours.
To help with this, you can replace heavy image files for modern WebP formats, as well as implementing lazy loading so content only renders as needed. There’s no point having all your images load straight away if it’s going to make your website slow to load.
Humanization
Making your business feel more human can help with your website being seen as more legitimate from Google. Instead of using stock images of machinery, you should include actual photographs of your engineers and equipment. This builds higher levels of trust with potential customers, which is hard for bigger firms to replicate.
This design shift converts visitors and provides a significant SEO bonus by increasing dwell time, so they stay on your website for longer. You can signal to search engines that your high-quality content is exactly what users are looking for.
Mobile Design
Most users now come through mobile devices, as accessing websites on-the-go is much easier than waiting until your home to use a desktop. This is true for construction, as contractors will want to have access to websites while they’re between jobs. You can implement thumb-friendly navigation that prioritises ease of use on small screens. Sticky headers or floating “Request a Quote” buttons at the bottom of the screen can be great for getting or clicking onto your contact page for more conversions, which allows Google to understand the importance of your website.
You can also ensure that all contact forms feature large, tap-ready input fields to remove the friction that often causes potential clients to bounce back to the search results.
Schema Markup
While construction giants often overlook the technicalities of website design, you can gain a significant edge by using Schema Markup to translate your website’s data into a language Google understands. Some of the more important types are LocalBusiness and Project schema, which can enable rich snippets that display high-impact details like your 5-star ratings or project price ranges directly in search results.
This technical SEO strategy ensures your listing appears on more screen real estate than a competitor’s plain text links. When you do this, you help with boosting your click-through rate and positioning you as the most authoritative local choice.
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Final Thoughts
When you want to outrank competitors in a highly competitive industry like construction, you need to think outside the box and consider things that they might not be doing. Hyper-local services pages can help you grow authority with specific keyword searches on Google, especially for the locations where you have depots.
You need to ensure that you have a mobile-first approach along with a quick loading website to prove to Google that you value the customer’s experience. Schema is also beneficial for helping Google understand what’s on your website, improving rankings and showing more information about your businesses on results pages.