The days of Mrs. Jones flipping through a phone book and selecting a business based on which has the best advertisement are over, which is a blessing for every contractor who embraces progress and realizes that he needs to move to other platforms to promote his business.

 The most practical solution for generating leads in today's home improvement market is to launch a blog, design it with an appealing aesthetic, and fill it with strategic, engaging content. If a blog platform is optimized and properly designed, promising leads to business opportunities will come.

But what do I mean by an optimized blog platform? It's simple: content. You need content. Think of content as fuel for your online marketing fire. And while we are living in a world of pictures and videos online, the best way to get found from a search engine perspective is text, and lots of it.

Now, the days of packing blog posts with spammy keywords are over. Instead, here are three things you should make sure you include in your post:

  • Type of service: kitchen remodeling, for example.
  • The answer to a question: How much does a kitchen remodel cost?
  • The benefits of your service versus a different option: Benefits of upgrading your kitchen beats moving.
More often than not, when prospective customers search online, they will pull up a search engine and search for one of those “types” of results.

By answering those three questions in your blog post, you get at the three types of shopper:

  • Somewhat interested, but need something to spur them to action.
  • Interested but not actively looking for your service.
  • Ready to buy—these people are actively in the market to buy your product or service.

This is why it’s important to stop chasing keywords around a page and actually craft content that speaks to people, not search engines.

 Whether entertaining or didactic, the primary purpose of your blog posts is to drive Web visitors to your blog. To do so, the blog must appear in the earlier pages of a search engine's results. And, as you now know, in order to appear early on that list, you  need to keep filling the blog with content as often as possible—the more you update, the more search engines will start showing your company higher in the search results.