You may have heard friends, colleagues, or worse, internet marketers, sling buzzwords at you, such as: increase organic traffic, long tail keywords, inbound links, etc.  Unfortunately, they tend to do this as if you were sitting at the coffee bar of Denney’s at 8 a.m.  That is to say, they toss them out too quickly to understand, eat, and certainly too quickly to digest.

So, this article explains why you want to know these terms, what they mean to general contractors and to small businesses, as well as how to use them to gain customers and revenue through your website.

Small Business Blogs Bring Additional Revenue to General Contractors

To start with, there are some significant advantages of having a company blog.  One of these is that you can increase organic traffic to your website.  What is organic traffic?  Organic traffic refers to the people who are coming to your website from search engines – They were searching for some key words that were used in one of your blog posts, saw your website on their search results page, clicked on the link, and found themselves reading a blog entry you posted.

This occurs more often than you might think.  Look at the chart below to see  the average impact of having a blog on a company webpage.

It is pretty clear why so many companies are starting to blog.  A 55% increase can make an enormous impact on the profitability of a business.  As a general contractor, that could easily mean a few more projects per year, just for keeping up a blog!

Another large benefit of small business blogs is an increased number of inbound links.  Your company website gets an inbound link whenever any other site links to one of your pages.  Later in this article, I link to the Google Keyword Tool, which gives Google another inbound link, not that they need it!

Inbound links are great for small business websites for a couple of reasons.

1)  They provide alternate sources of website traffic (inorganic traffic) – increase traffic

2)  Inbound links increase web presence – increase your competitiveness on the search engine results page, making your site easier for customers to find

Small Business Networking with Inbound Links

Inbound links can take the “I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine” mentality from the real world to the online marketplace, which is especially effective for small businesses, who need to expand their online networks as much as possible.  Linking to another company is in many ways like a referral, so while you would not want to as soon as you have a blog, you can trade inbound links with other, more niche-oriented contractors in the area.

You do not want to link to competitors, but all other related companies are definitely worth considering.

What can I do to make my general contractor blog effective at bringing in organic traffic?

One of the first things to consider, even before you decide what you want to write about, is the keywords you want to use.  First, you have to consider the amount of competition you are going to be fighting against for the top spots of the search results page.  Usually, the more general the keywords, the more competition there is for them.  For example, try typing in “general contractors” in the Google Keyword Tool.

You’ll find that the competition for these keywords is actually not so bad, rated at 6/10.  Which means that small business general contractors whose online presence is small are going to have a hard time getting any traffic from that keyword phrase.

On the other hand, if you type in “alaska general contractors,” you’ll see a rating of 1/10, possibly less, which makes that keyword phrase ripe for the picking.  Just last month, Google reports 320 searches that included that keyword phrase!  (And in case anyone asks, “alaska general contractors” is an example of a long tail keyword.)

Remember, for additional tips, there are plenty of resources on this website that will give you content ideas, practices to do and not to do, etc.  Take a look around and stay awhile. Better yet, post a comment of how you have benefited from blogging.

Join us for our bi-weekly webinar offerings where we cover topics such as blogging and inbound links.