These days most AEC marketing professionals know that they should be doing digital marketing for professional services and that simply having a website is not enough.
But we should be doing a lot of things: eating healthy, exercising, flossing thoroughly. And the reality is that with all of the demands on our time, digital marketing efforts may fall to the bottom of the list.
Not to mention that digital marketing for B2B and professional services is complicated. Think of the list of things digital marketing entails:
– Maintain robust social media on multiple platforms
– Conduct email marketing campaigns
– Blog regularly
– Get guest blog, guest podcast or guest vlog spots for your team of experts
– Create downloadable, premium content
– Conduct keyword research and search engine optimization
– Write case studies, and get testimonials
– Conduct educational webinars
– Create a monitor a paid digital advertising campaign with high ROI
– Build brand recognition
– Build digital relationships
– Conduct competitive analysis
And this isn’t even a complete list!
But in my experience, many small to mid-size architecture, engineering and construction firms have a small team of marketers with lots of demands on their time. Not to mention they may face leadership continually telling them “This is a relationship business. I don’t understand why this is necessary.”
So where should you spend your time when you only have time and resources to do one thing?
Answer: The services pages of your website.
OK, I get it. You already have services pages on your website and your leadership team agonized for hours over the exact wording. Who wants to touch it now?
But unless these pages are the top results on Google when you search for your services AND you have a 100% conversion rate, there is room for improvement.
Think about it. Your website has two goals:
- Bring in potential clients
- Get those clients to reach out to you.
And where better to start than with people literally Googling your services? While it’s unlikely you will be able to rank in the number one spot for people googling “civil engineering”, you may be able to rank for “civil engineering near Cincinnati” or whatever city you are in. Even better if you offer a niche service that not many other firms offer.
And unlike most of the digital marketing for professional services tasks in the list above, getting your services pages to rank and convert better can be a one-time effort, versus something that you have do over and over again week after week. Building brand recognition takes years of effort. Showing up higher in a google search may only takes a few days of effort.
So where do you start?
1. Start by figuring out what traffic you already capturing.
Visit Google Search Console and look at what traffic you are bringing in.
In most cases you will see your brand first, followed by whatever is bringing traffic into your site. In this case, Pixels has done and published a lot of work around client empathy mapping and you will see that it is showing up in those searches. While client empathy mapping is an important service, there is lots of opportunity to show up for our other services.
2. Figure out what Keywords are out there.
There are lots of tools for keyword research, but two to start with are spyfu.com and ubbersuggest.com.
Here’s an example. If one of your services is “commercial landscape design” put that search into Ubbersuggest.
While there are 260 searches a month for commercial landscape design, you can see that there are also additional searches for commercial building landscape design, landscape design for commercial buildings, modern commercial landscape design and commercial street landscape design.
Try incorporating these additional long-tail keywords into your content to get additional traffic and improve your B2B marketing.
3. Use Yoast or another tool to improve your SEO.
You’ll want to turn all the circles green. In order to do this you will need to make sure your content:
– Is written in plain English (don’t use complex terminology)
– Is long enough (cornerstone content is often 900 words or more)
– Uses your target keywords strategically.
Stumped for what to talk about? Think about the most common questions you get from clients. Can you answer those right on your services pages? In addition to improving your AEC digital marketing, it will also help you build trust right away.
4. Lastly, Make sure content includes frequent calls to action.
The first three steps are all designed to get potential clients to your website. Once they are there, you need to get them to call you. Even better, you need to know that call originated on your website.
Try including frequent calls to action that lead to a contact form.
TrueScan is a laser scanning company that reduces construction costs and change orders by providing accurate as-built building models before construction begins. By using “poke the bear” statements on their website, they drive traffic by reminding architects of one of their most common pain points.
No matter how people landed on your website, you need them to announce their presence so you can close the deal.
Watch traffic and calls increase.
So you did it! You did one thing. To know if you succeeded, return to Google Search Console and watch your organic search traffic increase over time.
Here’s the results from one our recent efforts.
There are three points in this graph when we spent time with the services pages. The first was in December of 2019. Although the return wasn’t immediate, you’ll see a dramatic increase in January of 2020. We re-examined the services pages again when the company launched a new website in August of that year and then again in January of 2021. Each time, we were able to increase traffic significantly.
So that’s it!
Easy peasy. Spend a few days with your services pages and kick your digital marketing s efforts off right. Our guess is with increased calls you may quickly be addicted and want to try out more digital marketing for your professional services or AEC firm.
What about you. What one digital marketing activity would you do if you could only do one thing? Tell us on Facebook or LinkedIn.
