Effective Internet Marketing Strategies For Deck Builders

Creating effective internet marketing strategies for deck builders is an excellent way to drive revenue and company growth. Deck builders fall into the competitive space of general contractors, home improvement, and construction.

Deck builders are experts in designing and building custom outdoor living spaces like decks, patio areas, pergolas, and even sunrooms. They typically will handle everything from design, material selection, permits, and construction, as well as ensuring safety and adherence to local codes.

This is how deck builders can effectively create an internet marketing strategy that can help grow their business to new highs.

Setting The Foundation For Effective Internet Marketing Strategies For Deck Builders

The foundation for your internet marketing strategy is the most important variable you can control. Even as a non-techy business owner, it is easy to implement these tips. First, you need to get the basics right before doing anything else. The three aspects of your foundation should be optimized and running smoothly before doing anything else. This includes your online presence, your website’s visual content and written content, and lastly, building trust and authority in your space.

Setting Up Your Online Presence:

Setting up your online presence is the first step in establishing an internet marketing strategy. Your website should be great; you should have your Google Business profile optimized, appear on local listing sites, and have reviews for your business. 

Let’s Discuss Each One By One:

Your Website

Your website is a reflection of your business. You need an up-to-date, modern website showcasing your business and what you do. At the very least, there should be a home page, a services page, an about us page, and a contact page. You should also have a blog page and a portfolio page. The blog page and portfolio pages are to showcase your work and help with your content marketing strategy, which we will discuss later. 

You may want to use the home page to target your primary search query (the main keyword you want to rank for). In this case, “deck builder” or “deck building” and the “city” you are in. Remember, when it comes to SEO, your target keyword should include the service you want to rank for and the area where you work. In this case, it may be “Deck Builders in Phoenix, AZ”. The target “keyword” should also be in the title tag, meta description, H1, and H2 tags, and in your 1st paragraph.

The reason why you would want your primary service on the home page is that you naturally get more links to your home page, thus improving the page’s rankings in Google.

Optimize Your Google Business Profile

To optimize your Google Business Profile, you need to create a Google Business Profile (here), fill out all sections of your profile accurately. This includes your Name, Address, and Phone Number (NAP). It also includes your operating hours, a business description, and the category (Deck Builder) of your business. It is also worthwhile adding high-quality photos and videos to your profile. You should also naturally sprinkle relevant keywords in your description, services, and reviews. 

In terms of ranking, NAP consistency and reviews are the largest levers to see improved Google Maps rankings. Prioritize these. 

Local Listings

Local listings are often called citations. The number of citations you have is linked to higher Google Maps rankings. The idea is to have your name, address, and phone number on the directory website with other helpful and useful information, such as a map of the location, images, operating hours, and amenities, if applicable.

Popular local listings include Yelp, Yellow Pages, Next Door, Angie’s List, and the Better Business Bureau.

We will discuss local listings in more detail when we reach local SEO.

Reviews

Reviews are an important factor for customers to make decisions to buy from you and to trust your company. Try to get as many 5-star reviews for your Google Business Profile as you can. It is a strong lever for local Google Maps rankings, and it provides social proof to potential customers.

Your Content Marketing Strategy

Your two content marketing weapons would be blogging about decking and your social media images.

Blogging

You should try to publish blog posts twice per month. This will keep your website from becoming stale. We are firm believers that new, fresh content helps trigger new keywords, improves your overall authority in the space. Without spending a fortune on keyword research tools, creating a list of blog post ideas is relatively easy. You pick a few talking points, and you write blogs on those.

For example, different decking options, the pros and cons of each, and maintenance on your decks. There is something you will want to avoid, and that is cannibalization. Cannibalization is when Google doesn’t know which page they serve for a specific query. An example of this is when you optimize your home page for your primary query “deck builder (city)”, you shouldn’t write blog posts with topics and titles like “best deck builders (city)” or “how to build your own deck in (city)”. Anything that can skew Google’s idea of what it should serve to the search. This is where the Topical Authority crowd gets things wrong.

Social Media Content Marketing

Content marketing on Social Media is where your business will shine. Instagram, with a good hashtag strategy, would be key to growing your audience and follower count. Using hashtags like your city you are in will help people discover your business. An example of this may be a photo of some decking that you completed in “Arizona Biltmore Estates”. The hashtag strategy may be #decking, #Phoenix, #Arizona, and lastly, #ArizonaBIltmoreEstates. This means that 3 of those hashtags will show up in the feeds of people in those areas. 

Try to post your work with detailed descriptions and take good photos. This is also going to serve as a portfolio of your work.

Building Trust And Authority In Your Space:

Building trust and authority as a deck builder requires you to showcase your experience, expertise, competence, character, and social proof.

You can build trust by getting certified and licensed. By displaying licenses, insurance information, and certifications on your website and advertising media, you can put the client’s mind at ease that you are professional, are bonded, and insured if anything goes wrong.

A showcase of all your work can help project your expertise through a project portfolio page showcasing all your work. Before/ after photos with detailed process explanations would help the buyer choose you. It is helpful to have a dedicated page for this, accessible from the main navigation menu.

Social proof is a great way to put your client’s mind at ease. Having reviews on your website with Google Business Profile reviews and Social Media reviews is a great start because it allows people to see what other people are saying about your company.

The Most Effective Internet Marketing Strategies For Deck Builders Who Want To Grow Their Business

There are many effective marketing strategies a deck builder can use to grow their business. These methods include local SEO, PPC ads, organic SEO, retargeting, and Social Media Ads. 

The easiest starting point is local SEO.

Local SEO

As we recently touched on in the foundation phase of your marketing, local SEO revolves around ranking your Google Business Profile. There are a few factors that heavily influence your profile’s ranking.

1. Reviews
2. Keywords in the company name
3. Citations and a consistent NAP

Stuffing keywords in the company name is incredibly spammy, but it works until it doesn’t. Your focus should be on an optimized profile, consistently building more citations, and getting reviews from clients. This is enough to push your business up the rankings. It also helps to be in proximity to the searcher.

Once you have some momentum, you can start PPC ads.

PPC Ads

PPC Ads can be split into two types of ads. The first is Local Service Ads, and the second is the normal Search Ads.

Local Service Ads

Local Service Ads are much like regular ads, but only show up on the Google Maps section of the page. You would combine this method with your local SEO strategy quite effectively.  Local Ads can be clearly seen where it says “Ad” next to the ad itself.

Search Engine Ads

Search Engine Ads are the regular ads we all know well. Optimizing these ads can be straightforward. You should target exact matches and ensure you also add as many negative keywords to the campaign as possible. For example, a negative keyword may be “free”. In other words, you wouldn’t want to have a paid ad showing up for “free deck building phoenix”, a person clicking it expecting to see you building decks for free. It does take a while to optimize and get your campaign to be successful. Once you have, the calls should be rolling in.

SEO

Once you have started getting traction on your local SEO and PPC campaign, it is time to focus your efforts on the channel that matters the most, SEO. SEO stands for search engine optimization, and it involves making specific changes to your website, optimizing it to improve the organic rankings in Google.

SEO involves 3 factors that need to be optimized. These are technical SEO, on-page SEO, and off-page SEO. Technical SEO ensures your website is technically sound. It can be crawled and indexed with ease. On-page SEO involves optimizing the content of the page you would like to rank for “deck builder (city)”. Lastly, off-page SEO refers to blogging and link building. Link building is one of the strongest signals in Google to rank your web pages. What we have found is that as you start building consistent, strong links to webpages, the rankings increase dramatically. You can also add paid ads retargeting to maximize the chances your visitors will return to your site.

SEO can bring in large amounts of inbound calls to your business. SEO alone can increase the profitability of your business tenfold.

Find an SEO company for your deck business.

Retargeting Ads

As mentioned above, your retargeting ads should follow SEO. Retargeting ads is a way for ads to be shown to people who have visited your store. When your SEO has started paying off, and people are coming to your site, sending them back to your site by showcasing some of your work is a great way to keep them reminded of your company and the work that you can do.

This should be treated in a manner that showcases your craft.

Social Media Advertising

Social media marketing and social media advertising are other ways to drive leads in your business. Social media advertising is best left last. Local SEO, PPC, and SEO are your best bets when starting a marketing campaign for your business because the results can be seen quickly and have commercial intent behind the search queries. Social media rounds the marketing campaign off well.

As with most marketing approaches, making sure everything works together synergistically would be key to seeing success and continued growth.

Conclusion

Like a lot of things, the process to develop an effective internet marketing strategy for deck builders requires getting the foundation right and then building from there. Much like what you already do in your day-to-day.

If you need help with your Google Business Profile or would like to learn about our Digital Marketing Services, contact us today.