SEO for Construction Industry Marketers
I was invited to explain Search Engine Marketing to the construction marketing elite at the CIMCIG annual strategy conference on 2nd December.
Having started my career with George Wimpey in 1991 in the pre-internet days, my first experience of internet marketing for the construction industry was commissioning the www.tarmac.com website in 1997 using a London agency to design the site having retrieved the domain name from a Hong Kong based cyber squatter.
The site was an (expensive) online brochure site. Moving through Tarmac and Carillion I don’t recall SEO or online lead generation being mentioned and even whilst at www.buildonline.com , the website marketing objectives were more focused on email marketing and newsletter list building than the online reputation of the websites for search engines. I’m pretty sure that when I left BuildOnline in 2001 the building industry had not yet woken up to SEO so I was both surprised and excited when doing a little research prior to the 2009 CIMCIG conference that Search Marketing in construction remains a relatively underexploited online marketing channel.