The days of homeowners flipping through the phone book and selecting a business based on which has the cutest or most eye-catching ad are over—which is a blessing for progressively minded home improvement companies. Sure, ads in the phone book might generate a lead here and there, but with each year, fewer people use hard-copy phone directories. Today, homeowners go online to search for the companies that they need to work on their homes.

And you need to be where they’re looking, and you need to be easy to find. The most practical solution for generating leads in today's home improvement market is to launch a blog, design it to look appealing, and fill it with strategic, engaging content that positions you as a trusted expert.

If a blog platform has the right content, you will, over time, generate many more leads than you do from other advertising that you may be paying for.

The Optimized Blog

To optimize your blog you need to do two things: provide compelling content, and make your blog search-engine friendly.

Though for the latter, how you make it friendly has changed dramatically, the best content for search engine optimization (SEO) is still text––including the primary, secondary, and even tertiary keywords that Mrs. Homeowner would use to find you.

For example:Primary keyword use: Your type of business and area: Kitchen remodeling contractor, Philadelphia
Secondary keyword use: Home remodeling project, Pennsylvania
Tertiary keyword use: Home improvement, cabinets, backsplash, flooring, etc.

What you’re doing here is LSI, or latent semantic indexing. LSI, as Wikipedia defines it is:

… based on the principle that words that are used in the same contexts tend to have similar meanings. A key feature of LSI is its ability to extract the conceptual content of a body of text by establishing associations between those terms that occur in similar contexts.

The upshot is that your blog posts shouldn’t be focused on having primary keywords used as often as possible all over the page. Mix it up and use your various keywords in the natural flow of the copy.

Keyword Placement

That said, there are a few keyword guidelines to keep in mind. You should have your primary keywords in the domain, in the title of the post, and in the first and last sentences of your blog because primary keywords are essential for SEO—they are used to describe the Web page as well as to help people locate the site. After that, just write naturally—including your other keywords wherever they happen to occur. Don’t be contrived when it comes to your copy, and both your reader and the search engines will reward you for it