Link Building for General Contractors

One of the most important factors in SEO right now, right after creating great content, is securing high quality backlinks. 

With the right mixture of high authority and niche relevant links, ranking your contractor business becomes tremendously easier! Of course great content is the only thing you can really rank for, good backlinks definitely help move the needle.

What are backlinks?

Backlinks are what people would consider “street cred”. When one website links back to another website, search engines like Google see that first website as vouching for the one it links to. It’s an important SEO ranking factor, because it helps search engines determine which websites are trustworthy. 

But not all links pass on this “street cred” to your website, also referred to as either link equity or link juice. There are two main types of backlinks.

Dofollow 

Links that DO pass on link equity to your website (helps your SEO rankings).

Nofollow

Links that do NOT pass on link equity to your website (does not directly help your SEO rankings).

How do you get backlinks?

 There are many good (and bad) ways to build links. Here are some of the most popular linkbuilding strategies of 2020.

Guestposting (new content)

One of the most common forms of generating high quality backlinks is to research websites relevant to your own. After coming up with a list of a few high quality websites, you would want to find contact information (preferably email addresses). 

Then you can do a content gap analysis to figure out what kind of blog posts/website content they don’t have, but their competitors do.

After compiling all of this, send each contact an email saying something along the lines of:

“Hey {contact’s name}, 

I see that your competitors A, B, and C all have pages talking about {topic} on their websites. They seem to be generating decent traffic from those pages, and it looks like you don’t seem to have comparable content on your own website.

My name is {first and last name}, and I’m an expert in {whatever field related to topic}. I’d love to help you out by writing a guest post about {topic} if that’s something you’d be interested in.

Let me know, and I can get started on it right away!”

It’s also important in a follow up email to ask if they would allow you to incorporate a link into the article and if they’d allow it to be a dofollow backlink.

Filling in the Gap (existing content) 

This strategy can come in many forms, but ultimately it consists of finding pages that would be beneficial to get backlinks from, and providing them more value in exchange for a link.

For instance, if you see a blog post about “how to paint kitchen cabinets” and you realize they don’t have any pictures of the actual painting process, maybe you could reach out and offer them rights to use one of your images in exchange for a link to your website.

Whether it be images, infographics, quotes, videos, or even just text – as long as you can provide value to a website, you have the opportunity to acquire a backlink in exchange for improving their page. 

Shoot them an email with your proposition and see how it goes. Worst they could say is no.

Buying Links

This one is a very complex method that often gets a bad rep.

Buying links can be a great way to get backlinks if you lack the infrastructure/time to build them yourself. If you buy links, it’s important to note that if someone is going to build links legitimately using above-board methods, it’s going to be semi-expensive. Expend to spend at least $100/link on the low end.

If they’re charging you peanuts in comparison, do not walk away, run. They’re most likely using outdated and spammy techniques to secure backlinks and Google has a reputation of implementing algorithm updates that rank old spammier SEO tactics lower and lower. If you’re buying links, and you think to yourself at any point in time “this is a good deal”, it’s not.