Biggest Changes in SEO for Concrete Contractors

Audio Transcript

Welcome back concrete contractors for another episode of your concrete success podcast where we bring you the latest strategies to help you succeed online for your concrete business. And in today’s episode, I’m excited to talk about the four biggest changes in S. E. O. In search engine optimization for concrete contractors in 2021. For biggest changes in the world of search engine optimization for concrete contractors in 2021. So this is part of our new SEO 2021 formula for decorative concrete contractors. This is actually a webinar that we’re running at at the end of june and you can visit our website concrete marketing crew dot com  forward slash webinar to look for the webinar link.

So you can register so again, if you are interested in listening to the entire conversation about how to optimize your concrete business online. So you show up and you generate more leads, more specialised, exclusive, high quality, high intent lead for your concrete company. You can go ahead and register at concrete marketing, crude dot com forward slash webinar or just go to concrete marketing crew dot com. And you’re gonna find the link right there. So again this conversation is just a small part of the entire sus strategy.

But I want to talk about the four biggest changes in SEO for concrete contractors in 2021. And you know this is gonna be an exciting conversation because I get a lot of questions all the time about whether S. Ceo. Works or not. You know we talked about that in the last episode of your Concrete Success podcast. And by the way if you’re listening to this and your favorite station on your favorite media, whether that’s Apple podcast, whether that stitcher or that Spotify, wherever you’re listening to this, give us a subscribe or if you’re watching this live on Youtube, go ahead and give us a subscribe.

Would really appreciate it. It helps the algorithms also give us a like and a comment on the videos certainly helps out boost our score on on the search. So I want to talk about search engine optimization. Why is it that we’re big drivers on sc Oh well I want you to think about the biggest lead generation companies out there, The biggest of the biggest home advisor. Let’s start with them. I’m going to tell you the majority of their traffic comes from the search engines comes from google.

So their strategy is let’s go ahead and rank our website home advisor dot com forward slash city name forward slash service in all the service areas. We’re going to rank it multiply and create a whole bunch of content, a whole bunch of links to all these pages, build an authority site and all of the sudden they’re coming up pretty much everywhere everywhere online for all these different services. And what they do is they captured the lead from individuals, going to google, going tubing, going to all these different search engines and capturing all the traffic and the leads and then they sell the leads to multiple contractors.

Now that’s a very successful business model for them. But when you think about your business, your concrete company, your decorative concrete business, where does it stand the moment that you stop paying for the leads for them? And not only that, but where does it stand in front of the eyes of your potential client? Right. Think about that for a second. In the eyes of your potential client, In the eyes of the consumer, you are just another guy that’s going to provide or another gal that’s going to provide a quote an estimate for them.

So if you’re solely relying on all these lead vendors to generate your only start thinking about how is it that they generate leads and is it worth for us to make the time an investment to put together a solid SEO strategy for our concrete company? So this is part of our concrete marketing plan which is what you can see here on my screen. Let me put a little bit bigger. And if you’d like if you’re a visual learner you can go to our Youtube channel and just look for this video.

The four biggest changes in SEO for concrete contractors. Um and uh this is part of the S. E. O. Dominance is step number three in our complete circle here, which covers the entire the entire sphere of everything that makes up a very successful internet marketing strategy for for flatwork and decorative concrete contractors. This has worked very effectively for all contractors that we’ve implemented this online in the United States. And I’m going to tell you the internet is not going anywhere, Google is not going anywhere.

So the moment that you start realizing, hey, I better have a solid strategy before all my competitors eat all my lunch, they’re not the sooner that you’re going to start having results, it starts generating better leads and better clients for your business. So again, this discussion is just a small portion of everything that we do here and we’re gonna have a lot more exciting content coming your way. But today we’re all numbers step three there, which is S. E. O. Dominance. So who am I? And why should you listen to me?

My name is Danny Barrera. I am the founder of concrete marketing crew, author of the digital concrete marketing plan, host of your concrete success podcast which is what you’re listening to this right now. Also an associate member of the American Society of Concrete contractors, board member of the decorative concrete council. I’ve spoken at the concrete the court show and other industry events. Um Some of our articles have been published in the concrete the core magazine as well as other concrete contractor publications and widely accepted as the premier expert inter marketing for decorative concrete businesses threat to us and look also, I also trained digital agency owners, marketing agencies and how to actually roll out a proven process that’s ethical.

That brings results for contractors because I’ve been doing this for a while. This is not my first rodeo. So I’ve been doing this for a while, I know the game, I know exactly how it works. Um And I just do a ceo for for big franchises, big businesses. I know exactly how it works at the enterprise level. I know how it works at the local level. And this discussion is about you how we can benefit you so enough. With with the introduction, let’s talk about the four biggest changes in the world of S. E. O. Search engine optimization for concrete contractors.

Okay, so now you know what S. E. O. Is search engine optimization? Uh and let’s talk about the biggest changes. So number one is you can no longer get away with duplicate content, You can no longer get away with duplicate content, you know? And and here is where this is coming from. This is coming from a place where concrete contractors used to be able to just get a domain website and go ahead and put together just very thin content small uh small paragraphs based around specific keywords based around their service area, based around all these different factors that would help them rank on google search.

And that used to be enough. And a lot of times what they would do is even competitors. What they would do is just go out to google, go to a different city, go to a different state and copy content from other uh contractors. Because here’s the thing, concrete is a very specialized uh, material, concrete is very specialized application, especially decorative concrete. You know, especially when we go into the world of concrete coatings, we’re talking about politics party, you know, and all these different, all these different applications, right?

There is really not that much content available out there. So what used to happen is a lot of copycats, just grabbing content and um just spinning content is what we call. And so a lot of that duplicate content uh that that used to work at one point in time, no longer works as good as well as it used to and also internal pages within a website. Nowadays there’s got to be a specific criteria where the content has to be absolutely unique for google to consider that page to be ranked on google search to think about this from the search engine standpoint, from the search engine standpoint.

Google is going to favor that content in that page on a website which it finds to be the most relevant for a specific search and not just relevant from a location perspective, but from also the context and the content that is going to provide for the answer that that is going to provide to the end user. Now. Number two is uh, number two of the biggest changes here is low quality links pointing back to your website, uh, and that used to work where people used to go to fiber and they used to get a whole bunch of links from India, from china, from Russia and this is still going on by the way where there’s a whole bunch of fiber sellers telling you that they can rank you and you know what you’re gonna do is you’re actually going to hurt your website and we get this all the time contractors who have done all of these spam tactics, which is what it is and coming to us now and saying, hey look, you know, I used to do well and now I don’t have any rankings and now a lot of times if you get penalized, that’s a six month process before you can even recover before you can even get into the good graces there with google.

So, low quality links pointing back to your website, no longer work. Um, as they used to, number three is, you need a real physical office to rank well on the google maps. You need a real physical office in a geographic, in your city that you want to rank. So if you are in Miami, let’s say you are in Miami and I am searching here from, from coral springs florida. Uh, and what this is about, I would say about uh, give or take close to 40 miles close to 50 minute drive.

You know, I’m not going to find a business from Miami here in Coral Springs for my location. It’s just not gonna happen. It’s just not gonna happen. This has been going on, but it’s more uh more dominant nowadays. And, and now within this geographical area, if I am in the county, All right, and I’m in the county and all. There are all these different cities that are quite small with smaller populations under 10,000, uh, in population. You know, there’s a bigger chance that I can rank the biggest city in the county that has the biggest population for that county, but it doesn’t tend to happen like that in every area.

So, so again, if you do want Iraq in a specific area, in a specific city or service area location, you gotta consider that you need a physical office. Um, you, we used to be able to do a lot of things, a lot of gray hat, things that we would work well, but no longer work. And number four is uh, one of the biggest changes is speed matters, speed matters on your website now, more than ever. So as we are building out websites and as you saw here, we start with your concrete website, which is part of the concrete market marketing plan.

And we start with the website because that is the foundation because we understand that site speeds matters, site structure matters, site content matters and everything that we’re talking about. It matters to give you the biggest probability of success, not just now, but into the future setting you up for success. So number one, let’s go ahead and just elaborate a little bit more here in this conversation and you can’t get away with duplicate content anymore. So most concrete companies serve about 25 to 50 mile radius, sometimes a little bit more, sometimes a little bit less depending on the service area.

But you know, it used to be very common to set up a whole bunch of different pages for each city uh and keep the same content and only change the city within the content. And I can tell you we are able to still utilize a different variation of that specific strategy. But it used to be that we we would just swap out the cities and use the same content internally on different pages and just change the cities and we would keep the same content. And you know what happened is over time that strategy has stopped working overtime, That strategy has stopped working.

And again, like I said, google will favor that search is all that web page which it finds to be the most unique and the highest relevant to the searcher intent. So with that being said, if the content is not 100% unique to that searcher or is not not serving and you’re building all these different pages and say that the cities that you’re building this these pages for are very close together. And the surgery is almost in the middle of the page, Google might find that a neither of this is actually the most relevant for me.

So I’m just gonna go ahead and rank this other competitor that seems to be the closest to me. Right? So that that that’s where the that geo relevance comes into play. So again, content does matter in context of the content as well. Um, so a lot of guys used to set up multiple micro sites targeting all these different cities with the same content with the same content. So let me explain that strategy. So you might still see this to a certain extent where concrete contractors would get a a website, domain names, for example, coral springs.

Let’s continue using this one. Coral springs concrete contract or dot com and say it was boko Ratan, right? They wanted to rank their that would get boko Ratan concrete contractor dot com. And they would get a whole bunch of this website and utilize the same content in all these different web properties. But you see the bottom line is google has gotten a lot smarter than that. You can’t do that. Especially if you’re hosting the website on the same iP address on the same web host and that, you know, that’s that’s just very, I would say it’s very 2005, 2006 S. E. O. Where you could get away with that but no longer is the case and last.

But not listening to this conversation is your pages must be unique from one page to the next. And I gotta say, what about, you know, specific specialized type of content where you know, we may share certain things. For example, you’re building a concrete resurfacing in concrete. Resurfacing can mean a lot of things in in the context of different applications, because you may you may expand into staining, you may expand into a specific type of coding uh into into a different type of resurfacing, right? So you may have different pockets and now you may need to use A little bit of content into an internal page that’s dedicated to sustaining an internal page that that’s dedicated to specific concrete coding.

And you see, so in that case, what I would say is your contents got to be at least 60% unique for concrete contractors in that specific context. Okay. It’s got to be at least uh 60% unique. So there is a website called site liner dot com where you can run your website and you will tell you how duplicate your content is across all the board. So you can check that out. There is something that we run when someone um calls us and they want to do an audit on their internet marketing.

We run their website there and we can tell how their contents doing. Also, you can go to copy escape dot com, run your website there and you can see how many pages have gotten, duplicate content online. Uh number two. Too many irrelevant or low quality links pointing back to your website. Uh that strategy is actually harmful to your business. If you are in business, if you have a brand and you’re interested in building a brand, stop taking all these shortcuts from fiber, just stop, just stop it.

It’s almost like imagine your perspective client, if you are an established concrete contractor, your, you know, your, you know, what you’re doing, your, your craftsman, you know, the quality of work that you rendered to your clients. But what about the specific prospects that it’s just going out for the, for the shortcut is going to craigslist is going to the market place on facebook and it’s looking for that guy that’s selling the $1 square foot and the concrete, right? Uh, flight by night concrete contractors. Right? So, you know who they are, you know, you know, what materials, you know, their applications and they’re finishing right?

You know, their, their, their, their techniques don’t work for, for a lot of these, uh, services that they’re saying that they offer and you know, it applies to everything. So low quality links, it’s, it’s the same thing as that basically, you know, low quality links. It used to be about links and that’s the thing. You know, the more links that you get now, it’s all about the relevancy of the links because that, that is what the penguin update from google search has addressed. Which is removing all the spam and how do we know it’s pam?

It’s because it gets its tiered, the those are tiered links used from easy to acquire link properties from web two point os from all these properties online that they just get spammed and they get spun content by the way, not unique content, spun content and there you go. That is how they come about giving you links to the website. Uh so, you know, over time, this is just not working as well as it used to. So number one is, if you’re a concrete concept or you need to have relevant links that are going to be in one category of location.

Uh Local links are very powerful. Uh, number two is within the construction and concrete industry, and number three is think about verticals that are also related to concrete. So, architecture, for example, you can get links from architectural websites, back to your business and since they’re part of architecture, you know, you can easily create content that’s going to talk about concrete finishes. For example, in an architectural standpoint. Now, if you are are a decorative concrete contract or you can also talk about the outdoor experience. So sites that talk about outdoors or landscaping, right?

So you can get a lot of those links from different verticals that aren’t necessarily in concrete or decorative concrete, but are almost like cousins. And that’s still counting its relevance as, as, as relevance for for your back link profile. So, at the end of the day, you’re back links tell a story about who you are. You know, it’s almost like that saying, tell me who you’re hanging out with and I’ll tell you who you are, something like that. And I think that’s how it goes. Yeah. Is that how it goes?

You go something like that, right? So it’s the same thing with back links. Let me see your back links and I can tell you who you are. So that’s basically what we help our our contractors do Make sure we build a strong backing profile. Number three is let’s talk about your google maps or google my business listening. Uh you know, you need a real address, real physical office. Forget about the P. O. Boxes that used to work before. Forget about the ups stores. Uh in fact, we’ve gotten clients over the past couple of years, we’ve gotten a ton of clients that they were using ups mailboxes and they actually had their google, my business taken down taken down.

And this was the hardest part is we appeal for reinstatement and that got denied. Now check this out, you appeal the reinstatement got tonight and for a couple, a handful of these contractors, we were not able to recover or or create a new google my business listing in that city with a different address, even if it was not a ups store mailbox or anything like that. Why? Because, you know, your website is a record, your website is a record. So just to avoid, depending on your service area, how how spam uh it is how much spam is going on on your google my business.

Uh you know, section there in your service area, depending on that situation. There’s a lot of factors that google is just uh it’s been very critical, it’s been very sensitive in the States about creating uh, google my business listing are very fine or getting manual verification or a takedown notice uh for that matter. So, you know, all of those things do play in, do take a place into this whole google my business. So you need a real physical office address. And how do we know it’s a real physical office address.

Number one, it cannot be a ups store or a mailbox or a virtual office. and number two, you must get some sort of of uh bill. So so utility bills, so whether that’s your light, electrical, the internet, you know, real utility bills work very well. So if you can get something pointed to an address that has your business, uh that works extremely well because google will ask you at some point in time whether whether, you know, you are um you are a real off especially for for those that might be into a shared space or anything like that or might be using an address that might be residential.

We’ve seen it happen, We’ve seen this happen nowadays more than ever. So make sure you are using a real physical address and also the location matters guys. So if you’re in the middle of a county, in a different county, county and county B or in the, or towards the end, uh, the outer skirts of a city and you want to rank, you know, in the entire city that does count. Just take that into consideration. Right? So, so with that being said, if you are not sure or where you stand here, go ahead and visit concrete marketing crew dot com and you can get more information schedule, a complimentary concrete marketing strategy session.

We’ll talk about this. Uh more in depth. Let’s go into number four. And site speed matters site speed matters. What about site speed? Like what, what are you talking about? Any side speed? Well, site speed is simply the amount of time that it takes for someone to to uh, for not for someone for a website to load. Okay. And load on different devices on a mobile device on the desktop device. This is a google experience. This is what google is now calling, calling the core web web vitals.

Core web vitals. And this is rolling out as in this video the moment of this video in june actually Wednesday the second they are rolling out a new google algorithm update that it starts to tap into the user experience and the speed. So this matters more than ever. If you want to rank and you want to bank, this will set you apart from competitors and again, this is why we start with your website from the beginning, we address the content. We address the speed. Uh, we address the structure of the website we address also the link structure that needs to happen on page as well as off page by doing the audits.

This is part of the entire concrete marketing plan here. And with that being said, what else has changed? Well, old fashioned S. E. O. Old fashioned search engine optimization for concrete contractors. It’s just no longer as effective as it once was. Like, it’s really not not working if you’re just starting out and you think that you can rank a new website the way that you used to before, it’s it’s just not gonna work. Guys um explaining simple number two is um in the in the post panda and post page in and penguin, you can notice all these different animals here.

It’s all about user experience optimization. So the more you can design a better website that has a better experience, better rendering in different devices, the better you’re going to do on search because you know, you’re looking at at the different things that google is also looking at analytics wise, which is the stick time. So the way someone sticks on the website and the pages that they visit after they’ve landed on the website and the experience and do they hit the goal and conversion, Is that the last click that that user went through when they actually made a search.

If you are the last click and you’re getting a lot of last clicks and a lot of conversions, google is going to favor that. It’s going to give you votes just because it’s a better experience. And last but not least, is the new Ceo approach requires a heavy focus on the user experience. And what I like to do here is I like to invite you to uh to go to concrete marketing crew and I have a special gift here for you. Let me go ahead and see if I can pull up my website here in a moment and go to concrete marketing crew and we have something special for you.

And by the way, I’m giving away this checklist here which is the ultimate internet marketing checklist for decorative concrete contractors. You can look at it right now if you’re watching this is the ultimate because it goes in depth into all the different things that you should take into consideration to fully optimize your Internet marketing plan to market and generate leads for your flat work. And that could have concrete business. So going there is absolutely free, there are no strings attached here. So you can go to concrete marketing crew dot com and in there you can, as soon as you get to the home page you can, there’s a button there that says free marketing checklist, you can click on that or towards the bottom.

There’s also the free download section. You just click on that button is going to take you to a page that says the ultimate concrete contractor online marketing checklist and it’s going to give you some details. You click on the download checklist and it’s gonna prompt you for some basic information and after you enter the information this, you should get this right to your inbox in a couple of minutes. So it’s absolutely free and I want to thank you so much for tuning in and listening into another episode of your concrete success podcast.

This has been Danny Barrera, great experience, have a great rest of your day. Thank you for watching God bless