Does Your Website Have the Essentials?
With each passing year, the trends become stronger. Consumers are relying on the Internet more and more to clarify and refine their purchasing decisions. What does this mean to you? The better your website, the greater likelihood you have of getting a service call over a competitor. Here are a few tips you should consider whether you’re analyzing your current site or in the process of building your first:
1. Keep your website current! Schedule some time—at least once a quarter—to critically review your own site. Look at it in a way a customer would. Also, confirm that all important content is correct, like phone numbers, and operating, like links.
2. Promote your website! First, ensure your website URL is on everything that leaves your office. Second, search for your company or the services you offer and see if your website shows up. If you find yourself, make sure the links to your webpage are correct. If you’re not, get listed pronto!
3. Invite customers to your website! Consider posting photos of your technicians along with a short bio for each. When your CCRs call to confirm service appointments, tell them to drive homeowners to your site so they can “meet” their technician before he arrives. This will increase the comfort level of homeowners, and it will get them to look over what products and services you offer!
4. Collect your customers’ email addresses! Make an effort to collect every address from every customer and do your best to keep them updated. Email is a great avenue for customer follow-up, surveys, reminders, announcements, and more!
5. Improve your SEO! Organic listings generate visitors that you don’t need to pay search engines for, and they have a higher ROI. Your ranking in organic searches depends on the optimizations you’ve made. So, first, review your metatags. If you don’t know what these are, find out.
Second, pick good page titles, which is the text that appears in the top bar of your browser. They’re the first things a search engine looks at to determine what the page is about. So don’t name your pages “page 1, page 2, etc.” Instead, give them a distinct title, like “electrical safety tips.” You want to use each page of your website as a different entry into the SEO lottery in order to improve your search results, and a unique page title for every page is one way to do that.
The Internet and SEO are like gigantic onions—there’s always another layer you can peel to go deeper. These are just a few tips that will help you to develop an effective site.