What a construction company's website needs

Construction company websites often serve only as portfolios: full-width renders, a short company profile and a contact page. People who plan a house don't hire a portfolio, though. Before they write to anyone, they want four answers: what will it cost, how long will it take, will it work on my plot, and why should I trust you. Clear answers on the website help buyers assess your services and decide whether to send an inquiry.

We are architects. CAD ART, our family's licensed practice, has more than 33 years and more than 500 completed architecture projects behind it, and when it needed a site that brings in clients, we built and ranked projektikuce.rs ourselves. This checklist is what that taught us.

What the website needs

Ten elements, each tied to a question the buyer is already asking. The sections below take them one at a time.

Completed-build pages that answer questions

A completed-build page is a sales page, not a photo album. Put the key facts above the gallery, as text rather than inside an image, so phones, screen readers and search engines can all read them:

• What you built: building type, area and levels. For US buyers, square feet next to square meters.
• Scope of work: shell only, turnkey, renovation or extension, and what the client handled themselves.
• Construction system: masonry, prefab or timber frame, plus roof and facade.
• Duration: when work started and when you handed the building over.
• Location and status: city or region (never a private client's address), and whether it is finished or under construction.
• Price guidance: a range or a link to the article that explains what drives the price.

A page like this shows what the client asked for, what you built, how long it took, and photos from the site, not only the finished facade. We apply the same principle on projektikuce.rs: every house design shows its area per level, bedrooms and bathrooms, heating and garage, a gallery, and links to related articles and categories.

Standard house models and filters

If you offer standard or prefab house models, or show more than a dozen completed builds, add filters that mirror how people search: area bands (under 100 m², 100–150 m², 150–200 m²), bedrooms, levels, roof type, garage, basement or pool. Two rules keep filters from hurting you in search:

1. Turn the searches people type into real category pages. "Single-story prefab homes" or "turnkey houses under 100 m²" deserve their own URL, a written introduction and links to related articles.
2. Keep filter combinations out of the crawl. Google's guidance on faceted navigation is to keep crawlers away from filtered URLs you don't need in search, for example with robots.txt or URL fragments. On moravamodern.com, the catalog we built for our family's architecture firm CAD ART, the filters run in the browser over a static list, so the catalog keeps one canonical URL.

Images that are sharp, fast and findable

Photos of finished buildings and renders of your house models show buyers what you offer, and people look for houses in image search too.

• Name files for what they show. Google's image guidelines say a descriptive file name gives it clues about the subject: single-story-house-flat-roof-garage.webp says something, IMG_4821.jpg and render-final-v3.jpg say nothing.
• Write alt text like a caption for someone who can't see the image. Google calls alt text the most important attribute for image metadata. "Two-story house with a flat roof and a covered terrace, street view" beats "house" or a string of keywords.
• Use the same URL for the same image. If a photo appears on several pages, reference the same image URL each time. You can also include images in a sitemap.

If you publish floor plans with your house models, export them large enough to zoom into on a phone, and repeat the room areas as text on the page.

A blog that answers the cost question

If you do not publish prices, explain what affects them: the building, the site conditions and the scope of work. Tell visitors what you need to prepare a proposal.

CAD ART doesn't publish prices either. Instead, projektikuce.rs has one long article on what a house design costs in Serbia: what drives the price, which documents a permit needs, how long each stage takes, and two real designs compared. It had 6,000+ readers in 12 months, more than any other article on the blog. It lives on one permanent address, and older versions with a year in the URL redirect to it. The whole story is in how we grew projektikuce.rs.

Other questions worth an article each:

• What it costs to build a house per square foot or square meter, and what that number leaves out.
• What a building permit requires where you work, and how long it usually takes.
• How to check a lot before buying it: zoning, access, utilities and slope.
• Building a house while living abroad: design, permits and site visits at a distance.

Put the year in the title if it helps, never in the URL, and link every article to the projects it mentions.

City pages done right

People search for a builder in their own city, so location pages can work. Each page needs useful information about your work in that location: Google's spam policies name doorway pages, near-identical pages for different cities that funnel visitors to one place.

Our test: if you can swap the city name and the page still reads fine, it doesn't deserve to rank. Projektikuce.rs has pages for Belgrade, Novi Sad, Niš and Kragujevac, each about that city: where people build, the terrain (plots on the slopes around Niš often call for a basement or a stepped house), the climate and local questions. Add the projects you have completed there.

For local visibility, keep your Google Business Profile accurate and up to date. We cover it in local SEO with Google Business Profile.

An inquiry form that asks about the plot

A form with only name, email and message brings "How much for a house?" The honest reply is "it depends", and you start from zero. A few well-chosen fields turn the first email into a brief.

Projektikuce.rs goes one step further and sells the plot check as a service, with a page that explains what the office needs and what the client gets: a written report within 7 working days. The inquiry arrives with the plot details already in it.

Phone, Viber and WhatsApp next to the form

Many people who build would rather talk than type. In Serbia and the region that often means Viber; for clients elsewhere in Europe, more often WhatsApp. Put tap-to-call, Viber and WhatsApp next to the form and in the footer, on one number, and say when you answer. For clients abroad, add your time zone.

WhatsApp's click-to-chat link is https://wa.me/ plus the full international number, digits only. Viber uses viber://chat?number=.

Fast on the phone

72% of visits to projektikuce.rs come from a phone. Google indexes the mobile version of a site, so what a phone gets is what gets ranked, and builders' sites are often heavy: site photo galleries, renders, videos, 360° tours.

Google's Core Web Vitals set the targets: main content visible within 2.5 seconds (LCP), a response to a tap within 200 milliseconds (INP) and a layout that doesn't jump (CLS of 0.1 or less), measured at the 75th percentile of real visits.

• Serve images as AVIF or WebP, in sizes that match the screen.
• Never lazy-load the main image at the top; lazy-load everything below it.
• Give every image its width and height, so nothing jumps while it loads.
• Load videos and 360° tours only on a click. On moravamodern.com a tour makes no third-party requests until the visitor opens it.
• Re-encode heavy hero images. On projektikuce.rs that took the home page hero from 271 KB to 172 KB with no visible difference.

Then test on a mid-range phone over mobile data, not on office Wi-Fi. This kind of work is part of every site we build and of our SEO services.

Licenses, people and completed buildings

A house is the largest purchase most families make, from someone they have never met. Make the proof easy to check:

• Licenses anyone can verify. If your trade is licensed or registered where you work, give the number and link to the public register.
• Real people. Names, roles and photos of the people managing your construction projects.
• Completed buildings. Photos of finished, lived-in buildings with the city and year. Renders show intent; built work shows you deliver.
• Real reviews only. Link your Google reviews. Never write testimonials yourself or add review stars without real reviews behind them.

Ours is CAD ART, the licensed office our father Boban Milivojević founded: 500+ architecture projects in 33+ years. A record says more than any adjective.

Languages for the diaspora and abroad

Clients don't always live where they build. Projektikuce.rs is in Serbian, and after Serbia its readers come most often from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Germany, Montenegro and Austria. Readers abroad don't need a translation; they need content for their situation, so the site has a guide to planning, permits and following a build from abroad.

Buyers from outside the region need a different site. The international collection of our family architecture practice CAD ART, Morava Modern, is in English, with areas in m² and ft², prices shown in five currencies, and a note on every plan that a local licensed professional adapts the design. If you add a language:

• Give each language its own URLs and connect the versions with hreflang.
• Adapt units, currency, legal wording and examples instead of translating word for word.
• Add a language only where you can serve clients: a German version pays off if you can answer in German.

Where this checklist comes from

When CAD ART, our family's practice, wanted to offer house designs online, it needed a site people would find, not just one that looks good. So we designed, coded and ranked projektikuce.rs ourselves. Its last 12 months:

What we built, how it ranks and the mistakes we undid are in the projektikuce.rs project and how we grew projektikuce.rs.

Questions builders ask

Should a construction company publish prices on its website?

You do not need to publish a price list. Explain what affects the price and, if you have reliable figures, give examples or ranges for shell construction and turnkey homes. CAD ART publishes no price list either, and its article on what a house design costs is the most-read article on the projektikuce.rs blog.

How many builds should the gallery show?

Fewer than you think, with more on each. Ten builds with full data, site photos and a real description help a buyer more than fifty thumbnails with a title.

What if we have no photos of finished buildings yet?

Start with buildings under construction: photos of each stage, with the city and month, show how you work. Label a render as a render, so buyers never mistake it for a finished building.

WordPress or a custom-built site?

Both can work. Image handling, speed on a phone and who owns the site matter more than the platform. We compare the two in Next.js or WordPress.

How long before the site brings inquiries from Google?

Months rather than weeks, depending on your market and competitors. Projektikuce.rs is the result of steady work, season after season. A Google Business Profile and a few strong pages that answer real questions are the fastest start.

Sources

• Google Search Central: Image SEO best practices
• Google Search Central: Managing crawling of faceted navigation URLs
• Google Search Central: Spam policies, doorway abuse
• Google Search Central: Mobile-first indexing
• web.dev: Web Vitals
• Google Search Central: Localized versions of your pages
• WhatsApp Help Center: How to use click to chat
• projektikuce.rs figures: Vercel Web Analytics, 09/2025–09/2026, rounded down.