After the credit crisis of 2008 the housing bubble burst and with it new construction leads became increasingly difficult to come by. Banks stopped lending. People and businesses stopped buying properties. Builders went broke. New construction came to a screeching halt. Things looked bleak.
As the years have passed, it finally seems that that the real estate market is healthy again. People are buying. Builders are building. It feels like we’re climbing our way back to some type of stability and growth.
Now that there are a growing number of new building projects, contractors need a steady source of leads to help their businesses grow. Over the next few weeks, I’m going to teach these builders a strategy for generating warm construction leads using Google Plus Local, formerly known as Google Places.
If you’re not familiar with Google Plus Local, it’s the section of a Google search engine results page (SERP) that lists anywhere from 1 to 7 businesses with gray markers to the right. The name, address, and phone number of the business is listed next to the marker. The markers are pinned to the location of each business on the map in the top right hand side of the SERP. See the screenshot below to see an example.
Google’s local search algorithm is driven by several key factors. Understanding and implementing these factors can help local construction companies rank higher in Google Plus Local, and put them in a position to consistently generate cheap construction leads in the future.
To help you better understand how to improve Google Plus Local rankings, I wanted list out some of these factors. I’ll then choose a real construction business to analyze, and in my follow up post, I’ll go through the analysis on how this real business can actually make improvements and increase their rankings.
Each year, renowned local search expert David Mihm publishes a survey where he asks other local search experts to weigh in on 108 possible ranking ranking factors that effect Google’s local search algorithm. For this post I want to concentrate on the top 10 listed below.
Now that we can reference the top local ranking factors, let’s choose a business to analyze in the next post.
For this analysis, I wanted to pick a business that wasn’t showing up in the first page of local results for “Construction Company Atlanta” when performing a regular Google search. In order to find a local construction company that met this criteria, I logged in to my Google+ account, hovered over the home button, scrolled down to choose “Local”, typed in my search term “Construction Company” + my city Atlanta, GA, and hit the search button. The top results produced when doing this search on Google Plus Local match up perfectly with the local results produced when searching in Google’s main search engine.
To choose a company that could benefit from this analysis, I scrolled past the first 7 results, which are the 1st page rankers, and chose the 15th listing, Rainwater Construction Company, Inc. In my follow up post, we’ll run through our list of top 10 local ranking factors to see how this company stacks up, and what areas they can improve. Stay tuned so you can see this full breakdown, and learn how to get more construction leads from Google Plus Local.
Anything you’d like to hear more about in the follow up post? Leave us a comment, and we’ll try to make it happen.
