Building and maintaining a home improvement blog can be a huge step-up for your home improvement business’s online marketing strategy. From an increase in brand awareness to driving traffic to your website, sharing your knowledge and experience through blogging is a powerful tool to build your online exposure and grow your contractor business. In fact, companies with blogs produce an average of 67% more leads than competitors without a content marketing strategy.
Here at HomeStars, we understand the importance of creating a stellar digital presence, which is why we recommend the following 7 steps to start a successful blog for your home improvement business:
1. Select the Right Platform
There are a couple of different avenues you may choose to explore to get your content in front of an audience.
Use Social Blogging Platforms like Medium and LinkedIn
Make the most of ready to use digital platforms without the added hassle of maintaining a website. Medium and LinkedIn offer an impressive network of users to broaden your audience, build a staggering reputation as an industry leader, and make valuable connections along the way.
Blog Right From Your Website
While social blogging platforms offer great outlets to grow an audience, publishing directly to your website works wonders in improving your business’s Google rankings and empowers visitors to peruse your services and quickly get in touch. Website builders such as Wix or WordPress offer a wide variety of design options and tools to help you set up a new webpage for your blogging project.
2. Pick the Best Topics
Deciding what to write about is often a difficult process. Your audience expects content that is interesting, educational and relevant to your home improvement business. Choose topics that are relevant to your operations. Here are a few ways to uncover subjects that will truly resonate with your audience.
Consider the Unique Aspects of Your Business
What parts of your business (experience, customer projects, services) help you stand out from the competition? Highlight these to form the perfect topics for your general contracting blog. You’ll position yourself as an industry leader, showcase your services, and grow your audience, all at the same time.
Review Industry Trends
You’re an expert home service professional with a voice that matters. Keep your readers up to date with interior design and residential home improvement trends they can implement in their own homes. Offer reviews on new products and materials, or provide insight on emerging home design trends.
Check Out Your Competition
A quick review of your competitor’s websites and social media accounts can yield a plethora of potential blog topics. What subjects are they writing about? What pieces are gaining the most engagement from their audience? Gathering ideas from your competition’s high-performing content can help you quickly generate successful subject matter for your own home improvement business.
Here are 8 home improvement blog topic ideas for you to use as inspiration pieces:
1. How to find the best general contractor
2. X Ways to make your home safe for kids
3. A comprehensive guide to building a new home
4. 2021 trends in home building
5. X things to include in your master bathroom renovation
6. How to create an energy-efficient home
7. X best flooring materials for your kitchen
8. Top 2021 Interior Design trends
3. Incorporate Quality Images
Engaging content will always perform the best, and let’s face it, sharp imagery will always capture more attention than large blocks of text. Breaking up paragraphs with exciting visuals will make it easier for your reader to digest your blog content.
Use Royalty-Free Images
Adding copyrighted pictures or graphics to your pieces can land you in some serious legal hot water. Rather, make sure any media content you include is all royalty-free or public domain. Websites such as Pexels, Unsplash and Pixabay offer free for use images that can be incorporated into your blog content. Simply search their image database, download your desired photo, drop it into your blogging platform and make your content more attractive!
4. Write Compelling Content
It’s not nearly enough to have a catchy title and captivating imagery, you need compelling content for your home improvement site to keep your reader coming back for more!
Outsource If Need Be
It’s not necessary for you to have great writing skills or time to write attractive content when you’re busy working on various construction projects. So, don’t be afraid to hire professional writers for the job. There are plenty of resources to find the right content writer to support your blogging initiatives. Platforms such as Freelancer, Upwork, Fiverr and even LinkedIn can help connect you with the best bloggers to support your brand’s objectives.
Nail Your CTA
Much like the rest of your marketing endeavours, your blog should always serve a purpose. The primary goal will likely be to convert more homeowners into leads, but how exactly will you accomplish this? Do you want to drive visitors to your website? Or perhaps lead them to your project gallery? Create a strong call-to-action statement (CTA), then hyperlink to the appropriate webpage to achieve your desired outcomes.
5. Optimize for SEO
One of the most valuable reasons to start a blog is to improve your website’s rankings on Google and other search engines. Search engine optimization (or SEO) does just that. To make the most of your content marketing strategy, optimizing your blog posts for SEO is a crucial step.
Choose the Right Keywords
Picking the right keywords that support your trade business is comparable to buying the right ingredients for a recipe. It’s not a suggestion, it’s a requirement for best results. Google Analytics Keyword Planner is a useful tool to select the best key terms with the highest search volumes for your blog posts. Alternatively, use Google Analytics in reverse to discover new and trending terms relevant to your business and create content around what homeowners are actually searching for.
Compress Images
When image files are too large, they have a rotten tendency of slowing down a webpage’s load time, effectively crippling your website’s SEO performance. Online resources such as TinyJPG and Compress JPG offer free drag and drop tools to compress or resize your pictures without losing image quality. Simply drag your desired image to the “Drop Here” zone, wait for the file to compress, and then download your new image file.
Link Building
Internal linking is a great way to keep readers engaged with your content and your website. Link words or phrases to other relevant blog posts or webpages where your audience can learn more. Generating traffic to your website is great, but it’s only when visitors stick around that you have an opportunity to convert them to leads.
6. Promote Your Blog
Don’t let your hard work and compelling content go unnoticed. Develop a marketing strategy to share your blog pieces and grow your audience.
Social Media
Create posts for your business accounts on Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter that showcase your blog content and direct homeowners to your website to read on. Take your content one step further and share it with industry-related groups and on your personal timeline to truly expand your content reach. Developing a social media marketing plan for your blog can help your home improvement business connect with target homeowners while increasing brand awareness.
Email Marketing
Develop an email marketing campaign that shares new blog content with your existing network of homeowners. Include a brief summary of the piece, related imagery and a strong call-to-action to drive visitors to your website to learn more. Introducing an email campaign that promotes your blog can help build a captivated audience, as well as your reputation as an industry thought leader amongst target homeowners.
7. Track your Progress
We cannot stress enough the immense value of measuring your blog’s performance. Because at the end of the day, the content plan in your marketing strategy is designed to serve a purpose – to generate more leads for your residential home improvement business. Track the performance of your blog content with Google Analytics. Monitor your website traffic, blog page views, average time on page, and average pages per session. This will help you gauge which blog topics are receiving the most visits, and measure the effectiveness of your blog’s call-to-action statements.
Apply the Necessary Changes
How much website traffic came from your blogs? What blog topics are receiving the most views? What were the top driving channels? (Google, social media, email campaigns, etc.) Regularly checking in on your blog’s performance equips you with the information you need to identify what is working and where your opportunities lie. Implementing data-driven changes can help you hone your content strategy to achieve great success.
Expand your Digital Presence with HomeStars
Creating a blog for your home improvement business is just the tip of the iceberg in building and maintaining a strong digital presence. With HomeStars verified badge and moderated reviews it’s easy to shine online. Click here to start growing your business with HomeStars today.
