A few weeks ago, after reading my Construction Marketing Ideas book, project supervisor Jason Fowler of Sea Island Builders in the Charleston, SC area communicated:
I just read your book Construction Marketing Ideas and took note of your offer to place a link to our website on yours to help boost our search ranking. Our web address is www.SeaIslandBuilders.com. I would love to have your insight on ways to improve our website if you have time to look it over. Please let me know if you need any other information. Also, share with me where you post the link so I can look at your site as well.
This request stood out from the crowd — well, it is the only one in the “crowd” of approximately 600 book purchasers in the past two years. Certainly the book has been well-received (though I have been humbled by one less-than-positive review on Amazon.com) but Jason is the first person to actually take up my offer to provide some hyperlinks and support for his business.
The Sea Island Builders site and blog truly observe best practices for residential construction marketing. Nothing too flashy here — and it may be some time before the builder achieves truly powerful search engine rankings unless visitors are directly seeking out the site/business. However, these points aren’t too important from the perspective of a visitor who might know about the company and is in the early stages of checking out the business. Key in “Sea Island Builders” on Google and you’ll quickly discover the site, and the positive reviews and recommendations on Houzz, the local Better Business Bureau A+ rating and the five-star Guildquality.com rating.
These days, you can build a site/blog of this quality without great technical resources and certainly without needing to spend much money. Obviously, the company’s solid local reputation helps — and is the foundation of the blog and site’s credibility.
Accordingly, I’ve listed the Sea Island Builders blog within the Construction Blogs and Resources section here, and under Resources in the South Carolina Construction News site.
(A couple of other notes here. ?First, over the years, I’ve learned that the businesses who may need the least marketing guidance and support tend to soak up the most information and capture resources available to them. In other words, a sign that Sea Island Builders’ management really knows what to do is because Jason Fowler is the first person to follow-through on my linking offer in my book.
(Secondly, this is a good example of my most important (so far) take-away from business growth consultant Bruce Johnston: — Don’t procrastinate — if you want to grow your business, you need to be able to respond rapidly. Here, Jason sent his initial email to me on March 11. I took “too long” by my standards to respond; answering him on March 13. I explained that I would be happy to fulfill his request, but needed to work through the blog reviews for the 2013 Best Construction Blog competition first. That has been done, now. The Sea Island Builders blog certainly meets the competition’s criteria, but it would be unfair to enter it this year — but it won’t hurt to participate in the 2014 contest.)
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