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Search engine optimization

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

How is Your Google Places Page Treating You?

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So it has been about 6 months now since the Google Places splash. And while many of you have gotten out in front of the curve and been rewarded with some of that great free traffic Google Places brings, I want to ask how many of you have any user reviews yet…real user reviews?

Do you have one? Do you have five, ten or one hundred? Or do you still have none?

If you still have none, you better get to work. Google Places is there to help bring you free leads but you have to work to get them, and soliciting reviews from your clients or customers is part of that effort.More

Use Location Specific Landing Pages Instead of Keyword Stuffing!

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I have noticed that a really prominent contractor website design company packs their sites with city-based keywords in the footer of their sites. It got me thinking if their clients know that their sites have the potential to be flagged (and dropped in the rankings) by Google for keyword stuffing?

My solution – Location-specific landing pages

Instead of putting their clients at risk, what they should be doing (and you should to) is create location-specific landing pages. These are pages that are optimized for two things; what you do and where you do it.More

Why I Think SEM Beats SEO for Contractors

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This is going to be a short post, only because I think the argument could go on forever. But for your purposes, it should be an easy choice. Before I get started, I want to make sure we are on the same page when I say SEM or search engine marketing.  I am basically talking about pay-per-click advertising such as Google Adwords or Bing or Facebook or any other way to pay for placement online.More

How Did Your Site Do This Year?

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If you are like most people,  you are wrapped up in getting things done before the holidays, and you haven’t had time to think about anything much less your website or your advertising for next year. But right now is when you need to plant the seeds that will grow into new business next year!

Which is why I need your attention!

I want you to start game-planning and figuring out what you want from your business for you, your employees and your clients or customers. And if you need more clients or customers, ask yourself what are you going to do to get them? What are you going to do differently next year than your competition?

Specifically, how did your website do for you this year?

With Google focusing more and more on local companies, you need to make sure you have a website that will convert that traffic they send you into leads, and hopefully new clients or customers. If your website has been more like having a billboard in the woods than a lead generation machine, then you need to reconsider your strategy.

You see, every contractor has a website, but not many convert the traffic they are getting into paying customers or clients. And when asked, he or she will tell you the site didn’t work because the economy sucks, or people don’t have any money. I will tell you that’s bullshit, it’s because their website sucks.

Why?

Because many contractor websites were thrown up online and left there to fend for themselves, with no support or maintenance. These sites are simply there as brochureware, just so some contractor could say, “Yeah, I have a website”.

But I’m here to help America!

In the full spirit of Christmas, I came up with an idea. Now until the end of December, I will review, and more importantly, give you a detailed strategy for you to implement to get your website performing the way it should be.

Normally, I do this for $199. But right now I am offering a full website review with recommendations for just $99. I offered this promotion to my newsletter readers earlier this weekend and I have a few spots left. So the first 5 people who sign up will get their site review for $99.

After that, I will shut it down for the rest of this year. Seriously, no salesy BS, I am going to do these reviews the week between Christmas and New Years, and I only have room for 5 more.

Interested?

Here’s what you have to do. Click the “Order Now” link below to get started. Give me your website address and phone number in the notes section of the checkout form and that’s it. I will follow-up with an initial email telling you I am getting started. I will then follow-up with a phone call and email summarizing your results.

If your site isn’t performing like the 24 hour a day sales rep it is supposed to be, then let’s talk about what you need to do to make your site your own little lead generator. If you have any questions you want to ask before you get started you can email me at darren@darrenslaughter.com or call me at 215-740-2713.

Ready to get started, then ORDER NOW!

It’s Important to Eat Your Own Dog Food

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construction-marketing-website-design“Eating your own dog food” or “dogfooding” is a term that means to use your own product or in my case, to take your own advice, which is something we all should do from time to time. I have eaten my own dog food. While spending the last few weeks concentrating on website design and layout, I started thinking about the blog. Over the last few weeks I have gone back and forth between a 2 column  or 3 column layout, a new header, then back to the old one, and I tested a new color scheme. In the end, I have adopted the “F” word.

Welcome to the “F” word!

Website usability is a key component to developing new business, and I like to develop new business. Which is why I always want darrenslaughter.com to be as easy to use as possible. In chasing that rabbit down the hole, I have changed the blog a bit and adopted a somewhat non-traditional look for most blogs by having my sidebar on the left side of the page instead of on the right side. I have done this because we read web pages the same way we read text in a book or on a newspaper– our eyes automatically start at the top left and work their way across the page towards the right. Then we start again from the left on the next line.

Take a look:

Photo Credit: Photo Credit: useit.com

I have known about the “F” pattern of reading for a long time, but never adopted it here because I know you are probably used to reading blogs that are setup with their main content/sidebar content and I didn’t want to make mine different. But after coming across Jakob Nielsen’s post again I thought a change was in order.

From Jakob’s findings:

In our eyetracking study, we recorded how 232 users looked at thousands of Web pages. We found that users’ main reading behavior was fairly consistent across many different sites and tasks. This dominant reading pattern looks somewhat like an F and has the following three components:

  • Users won’t read your text thoroughly in a word-by-word manner. Exhaustive reading is rare, especially when prospective customers are conducting their initial research to compile a shortlist of vendors. Yes, some people will read more, but most won’t.
  • The first two paragraphs must state the most important information. There’s some hope that users will actually read this material, though they’ll probably read more of the first paragraph than the second.
  • Start subheads, paragraphs, and bullet points with information-carrying words that users will notice when scanning down the left side of your content in the final stem of their F-behavior. They’ll read the third word on a line much less often than the first two words.

It’s hard to argue with that type of data, so I am giving it a try here at Darren’s house of useless knowledge. I am primarily concentrating on the increased/decreased number of subscribers I get to the newsletter on a weekly basis as my yardstick to measure by, and I will let you know the results in a few weeks.

But, if this little exercise tanks and you see my ugly mug over on the right side of the page again then you know it wasn’t going well…or I just changed my mind…again! But how about you, any plans to make changes to your site for the coming year or are you happy with your current results? Let me know.

Your Contact Page is Killing Your Business

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One of the first things I do when I review a site is look at the contact page. It is a way for me to determine the skill level of the site designer who created it. Why is that important?

Because if you have a crappy contact page, you ARE losing business!

First of all, I need you to drink the kool-aid on this concept; ready…your contact page is not a fucking sales tool! Too many times I see contact pages packed with questions that should be reserved for a conversation or follow-up email.

So, before I give you what you should have on your contact page, I am going to tell you what NOT to have on it. Ready?

1. Unless you have a retail location or some other reason why people would need to know your address, take down the map with driving directions. NO ONE CARES WHERE YOU ARE, you are going to go to them!

2. Stop asking for information that isn’t relevant to someone contacting you. In other words, stop asking where they work, what their work number is, home number, cell number, daytime number, evening number, blah blah blah blah blah! They will give you the right info to reach them, that’s why they are filling out the friggin’ form!

3. Don’t make every select required!

Now that we have those out of the way, here is what you want to have on your contact page:

1. If possible, only ask for the user’s first name, and make this a mandatory select.

2.  Email address – This is obviously ok to make mandatory too.

3. Home address is questionable. Sometimes I use it, sometimes I don’t, it depends on the situation. Women will almost always avoid (by not completing the form) giving you their home address without talking to you first.

4. Phone number – Users will, by default, give you the number that is most convenient for them. Don’t make this one required, and stop asking if daytime, nighttime, morning is convenient. Just pick up the damn phone and call them.

5. Have a privacy policy conspicuously displayed near the form.

6. Don’t just have your contact form on the contact page. It should be in the sidebar of your entire site.

7. Comment or question section – This is where you want them to tell you why they are reaching out to you. Don’t make it required, and don’t limit the number of characters they can use in this box. Nothing pisses a user off more than when they get deep into a thought and your form tells them they are limited to 250 characters!

If you need a general idea on how to set up your contact page, check out mine. Notice I only have two selects that are required, that’s because I just want to know how to reach you, the rest we will figure out when we talk on the phone or through email.

That’s it. Now I know a lot of you out there are freaking out and calling me an idiot, but here are some FACTS. For each additional question you ask on your contact form, you reduce your conversion rate by 10%.  This is why your contact page is not meant to be a sales tool. It’s not there to help set you or your sales people up for the call! Having only 4 or 5 data points also lets you place the form in the sidebar of your entire site.

If you think I am crazy, test it. Run your current contact page for a month, then run mine. If your results don’t improve using mine, then God bless, go in peace and go back to using yours. But I am betting on mine! 😉

Construction Websites Deconstructed: The Catch-up Post

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As promised, I will still be doing the Construction Websites Deconstructed series, but I don’t think it makes sense to do it every day because as one person pointed out, “what do you think, I have nothing else to do but read your shit all week!?!” He was kidding, but I thought he made a great point.

Sooooo, while I still will run the series, I will do the posts on Fridays going forward. The entire series will probably run through the rest of the year with the occasional Friday off, but I should wrap up by New Years. As for today, I will be doing a catch-up post from the past few days, so here goes.

Tip #1

Use Hyphens instead of underscores – If you look at the URL of this post (unless you are reading it on the day it was on the front page) you will notice it reads https://darrenslaughtercom.stage.site/construction-websites-deconstruced-the-catch-up-post/. Notice I have hyphens to separate the words instead of underscores. This is a SEO strategy that has its roots back to August 25th, 2005 when Matt Cutts explained that using hyphens will help your content get found easier.

Tip #2

Avoid hyphens in your domain name – Most of the great domain names are gone. Sucked up by domain squatters or legitimate enterprises, it is tough today to get the first or even second or third name you want. So you think getting your first choice with a few hyphens makes sense…it doesn’t.

In the online world, people associate New-Orleans-Plumbing-Contractor.com as spam, and your chances of getting clicked on are pretty low. If you absolutely have to use a hyphen, just use one, and don’t use it with anything else other than a .com extension!

Tip #3

Get a proper email address – If you have your own website, such as bobspainting.com, why the hell are you still using bobthepainter at yahoo.com as a business email address? I can almost promise you a $10k a year raise just by ditching the amateur email address. That goes for aol.com, hotmail.com and even gmail.com. You’re a business, act like it!

Tip #4

Pick an address – In Google world, http://www.yoursite.com and http://yoursite.com are two different sites. And each will rank on their own for keywords and searches. Make it easy for Google to decide which site to use as your primary site by setting the canonical URL to either the www version of your site or the non-www flavor. You do this with a 301 redirect, or by telling Google which version you prefer. You can get more details here.

Tip #5

This one is probably the most important of all the tips so far, because screwing this one up can cost you business. Ready? Make sure your site works in multiple browsers. Just because you are an Internet Explorer fan doesn’t mean your visitors don’t use Firefox or Chrome. Or maybe your viewers are Apple fans and are using Safari. Making sure your site is compatible with all the major browsers will assure a solid user experience. If you are not sure if your site works, check out this tool, then call your web person if you run into any trouble.

And that’s it, some solid info for you to start working on over the weekend. Stay tuned over the weekend as I tackle a question from a reader on what long-tail keywords are and how to use them!

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