SEO: How important is it for construction marketing?

Getting your website to the top space on key search engines for relevant keywords is the modern-day more-than-equivalent of achieving top billing both in size and impressions on the Yellow Pages. It is "more than equivalent" because the dynamic power of high rankings coupled with immediate action -- visiting your website -- can make all the difference in lead discovery and conversion for your business.

How do you achieve this ranking?

The best answer is to create a site rich with useful content, worthwhile whether or not people actually buy anything from you. The content, of course, should relate to topics relevant to your product or service.

The next stage is for your site to attract enough links from other (credible) sites who find your content valuable and worthy of reference. You can of course set up relevant Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn groups and pages, and post on relevant forums (where you may be allowed to reference your site within your signature.)

Finally, you might approach bloggers and other editorial sites and encourage reviews/comments. As well, you might start your own blog and update it frequently (a good way to move things ahead.)

This process should take more time and effort than money but can be highly frustrating as you do the work and don't see direct or measurable results.

Some services purport to be specialists in Search Engine Optimization and some perhaps provide value for your money. However, you may find you pay a lot of cash for disappointing results.

As well, you may find you have optimized the wrong thing. Your keywords may not be relevant to end-users and you may find few if any real customers respond to you.

I would advocate becoming a true expert and showing why on your websites. Help people understand the issues and challenges you can help them solve and solve some real problems both in words and images to help people along.

Then you will have a worthy site in its own right, whether or not the search engine forces wish to recognize your construction marketing ideas.