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Contractors, Make the Most Out of Search Results

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The Internet is a labyrinth of sites so big it boggles the mind. In fact, how someone manages to find your site is a miracle of modern technology right?

But all traffic is not created equal

Most of the time, we don’t pay enough attention to how people find our sites, we just assume it is someone typing something in the Google address bar and POOF, they wind up on our sites, and for the most part that’s true. Except, the searcher’s intent is even more important now than ever before.

Why, because we all know all search traffic is not created equal. Let’s take a look at where two search terms and how one could mean anything, and the other could mean cold, hard cash to your contracting company.More

Measure Twice, Cut Once Works on Websites Too!

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I want to cover some things you and your staff (if you have any) should do before launching an advertising campaign online. The biggest thing you need to consider right now, today, before you spend one dime promoting your contracting business online is – your existing website.

If your current website is merely a place holder or “online brochure”, then it’s time to get real. If you’re lucky, people are coming to your site everyday and leaving without contacting you. Yeah, you read that right, I said lucky. You are lucky because prospects are finding you in spite of the fact that you have a shitty website. Trust me when I tell you, not having traffic and still having a shitty site is much, much worse!

Why is a terrible site with traffic a good thing?

Because fixing the site means people will stay around longer and God forbid, maybe join your mailing list or even become a client or customer! Now, I am a marketing guy from way back, so I never really adopted the “sticky” philosophy many web types talk about. You should want prospects to stop by your site to educate themselves on your business, become clients or customers, and continue to buy your products or services while referring you to friends and family. If your goal is anything other than what I just laid out for you, then you are reading the wrong blog!

So, let’s talk about fixing your site

Now, I am a firm believer in the old saying “You don’t know where you are going if you don’t know where you’ve been”, so let’s get an idea of where your site is. First, let’s find what Google knows about your site:

Step 1: Go to the Google search page at www.google.com and type the following without quotes “site:YourDomainName.com” in the search bar. It should go without saying, but in case you haven’t had enough coffee yet, replace YourDomainName.com with your actual website address. Google will list all of your pages they have in their index. The higher the number of pages listed the better. You can also try this tactic for your competition. That way, you can get a nice list of sites and review their material all at once.  Then test some of your links by clicking on them to make sure they go to the pages they are supposed to. If they don’t, get them fixed ASAP.

Step 2: Now, go back to the Google search bar and type “links:YourDomain.com”. This is the total number of sites that link TO YOUR SITE. Again, the higher the number the better. To Google, more links means you are an authority on your topic. You always want to be increasing your links and you should have a solid linking strategy and stick to it.

Step 3: If you haven’t already, go to Google Webmaster Tools and sign up for an account. Once you sign up, you will be given a piece of code to insert on your site. This code is what Google uses to give you vital information about the status of your site. You can read more about Google Webmaster Tools here.

Step 4: Again, if you haven’t already, go and sign up for a Google Analytics account. It’s a free service from Google and it tells you everything you need to know about the visitors to your site. Once you install the analytics code, you will know how many visitors come to your site, how they got there, how long they stay, how many pages they view and much more. You can find out more about Google Analytics here.

Once you have this information, you can then begin to track your progress. If up until now you have just relied on the reports you get from your webmaster then you are doing yourself a huge disservice. You need to be involved in every aspect of your website just as you are in your business.

Design Consideration for Contractor Websites

Color: Just like your home or office, a fresh coat of paint does wonders to freshen up a stale looking website.  How long has it been since you changed the look and feel of your site? Does your color scheme scream 1990’s web 1.0?

Spelling & Punctuation Errors: Do you know if your site has any spelling or grammatical errors? I bet your customers do! You need to check your site and make sure everything passes your 3rd grade English teacher’s smell test. If your site is too big to check, offer a small reward to your visitors by pointing out any errors they find.

Layout & Usability: This is the ultimate website functionality killer! More people leave a site because of navigation issues than any other reason. To combat this, follow some simple yet effective tips to make sure your visitors are getting the experience on your site they deserve. Things like broken links, pages that end without giving any direction on what to do next, PDF files that take forever to load. These are just some of the layout issues that send people screaming into the night and off of your pages. Now, I understand you have a business to run, and maybe all this website stuff is beyond your ability. Then you need to read just one book; “Don’t Make Me Think ” to realize how site design and layout determines the way your visitors interact with your site and by extension, your company.

Selling Factor: This isn’t a typical metric or deliverable you are going to find from most site designers, but it needs to be a key factor to you. You basically need to know how well your site does at converting a prospect into a lead, and then into a client or customer. If you haven’t gotten much business from your website, then there is plenty of work to do. The good part is, just fixing the selling factor alone could be enough to start the sales engine your website needs. You can determine the “Selling Factor” using Google Analytics or with the help of your webmaster.

Scalability: How open is your current website to scale? What that means is any online advertising is going to put extra strain on your site and system resources. Ever hear of the Digg effect? It’s when a site or blog gets on the front page of Digg and all of a sudden thousands of visitors show up on your virtual doorstep. If your site isn’t hosted on a robust enough server it is going to crash at absolutely the worst possible time. In other words, now is a good time to evaluate your current hosting company BEFORE the heavy traffic comes. And to make it easy on you, if you are paying $4.95 for a basic shared plan, then I have two words for you…your screwed. So, if you are in the market for a new hosting company, check out BlogOnCloud9, they can handle all the traffic you can throw at them.

So, that’s a pretty good start to getting your website ready for what hopefully will be a flood of new clients and customers. If you want to get a copy of my “website preparedness” worksheet, drop me an email or let me know in the comments below and I will get one out to you.

Online Advertising Boosts Offline Sales

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There is no doubt people are doing more and more research online before they buy. But if you have ever wondered if online ads converted into offline sales, Google has produced a video showing some of the research they did to confirm that yes, marketing your business online has a positive effect on people contacting you offline. Now, the data provided in the video is primarily for retail locations, (which works well if you are a home services retailer) but I am sure it translates to in-home sales as well.

Review of Manta.com

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socialIt’s funny this thing called the Internet, when trying to figure out the best leads for contractors, you can find yourself lost in a sea of options. It was supposed to tear down borders and make the world closer by being able to reach out across the planet and talk to anyone at any time. Little did we know that it would take less than 20 years for the Web to come full circle and have us all concentrating on what we already had…local relationships.

Sites like Groupon, Yelp, Foursquare, Gowalla, Facebook Places, Google Places and LivingSocial have us all checking in and commenting on our experiences with local merchants in almost real-time, not to mention the number of local directories seems to grow every day. Merchant Circle, Thumbtack.com, local.com, citysearch.com, and kudzu.com all promise to bring traffic to your site. But a new site popped up on my radar screen the other day – Manta.com.More

AdWords Doesn’t Have to Be a Dirty Word

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Inevitably, when someone tells me that a particular type of marketing “sucked” or “didn’t generate any leads,” I tend to want to look for reasons why and how we can improve their result. This has never been truer than with advertising online using Google AdWords.

There are just so many things that can go wrong!

Creating a solid ad campaign with AdWords is a lot more involved than creating an ad for the local yokel. Things like CTR, Quality Score and CPC tend to scare off the uninitiated. And for those of you who soldier on and lose a couple hundred bucks before retreating back into the loving arms of free Craigslist ads will tell others to stay away.More

Why Contractors Need an Online Presence

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As the Internet evolves, more and more businesses are creating websites, social media pages and even blogs. Sure, not all contractors have blogs but if you are serious about improving your online marketing strategy and building a larger client list, it is mandatory.

The great thing about having a blog for your business is that you can be as little or as much involved with it as you wish. If you don’t want to write an article everyday, that’s cool. If you just want to do it once a week, that’s cool too. I would suggest you don’t go more than two weeks without posting.

By starting a blog related to your contracting company, you will notice an improvement in your online marketing success. Three things that your blog will do are:More

Targeting Buyers With PPC Advertising

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PPC advertising, done correctly, allows you to reach a valuable, ready-to-buy set of customers at a point-in-time when they are actively seeking information about your product or service. And since they are fully engaged, and looking for help in selecting products and services and businesses to meet their needs, you must have your business front and center when they go looking.

Targeting buyers with PPC advertising

Targeting the RIGHT keywords gives you access to people who have already “kicked the tires” and are looking for a contracting company to hire. Keyword phrases like “Home remodeling companies Philadelphia, Pa” are much closer to the buying phase than people searching “remodel my kitchen” probably are, and you are not even sure what the searcher’s intent is with such a vague search term like that as they may be looking to do the work themselves. But someone looking for a company to do the work is exactly the type of searcher you want to find your page.More

If Your Website Isn’t Bringing in the Sales, Help is on The Way!

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UPDATE 3/12/2011: I forgot to mention in the post that I can include a $100 Google AdWords card to use with a new AdWords account. So, if you pick the public review (keep reading) and you get $100 in free clicks, you are at zero out of pocket – just thought I would throw that in there!

In-depth website critiques

If you want to know exactly what you need to change about your current website to make it pull in more leads to help you close more sales, I can tell you.

In fact, I’m going to personally send you a video and an action plan where I go through your site, page by page, showing you not only what you need to change to bring in more clients or customers, but exactly how to change it.

So if you’ve been struggling with how to make a website your audience will actually enjoy reading (and tell other people about), and you want a clear list of simple, “non-salesy” things you can do to increase those conversions on your site, then keep reading!

Now, if you are new here on the site, you need to know that I am not your typical high-priced web designer who is out there charging a fortune. I’m actually a marketing and advertising guy who writes his own copy and creates sites that do one thing…convert traffic into leads.

While I’m am pretty good at marketing, what I am just as good at is making website concepts easy and simple to learn while I teach you how to implement them into your site. And a lot of my clients have been asking me for more guidance on website layout and functionality, so I have decided I am going to offer a specific package just for those people who want some help with giving their websites the tune-up that they’ve been desperately needing.

Here’s how it works – Three simple steps to a much better website! Click here for more

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