Introduction
Whether you’re at the start of your business journey or you’ve been in the game for a while, if you don’t have a functional website for your business, you’re missing out on valuable leads.
As a tradie, you know that your leads are your lifeline. Don’t waste your time with Yellow-Pages, Hipages, or any other pages that aren’t your own.
With a website, you can create a fully customizable platform to suit your trades needs, and rank for organic local searches. You’ll be bringing in leads and lifetime customers while giving your clients an easy way to get in contact whenever it suits them. After all, a website is also your 24/7 sales pitch.
Word of mouth is a great tool for tradies, but what about all of those people heading to google to look for your services. Without a great website, you’re most likely not getting those clicks, and terribly going unnoticed by that 46% of local google searches. That’s right, more and more people are taking to the internet to find nearby services, long be gone the yellow pages days. Get a website, get your company on Google, get yourself seen.
Here are Some Valuable Reasons to Get Your Tradesman Site off the Ground
Give Your New Clients a Reason to Trust You
46% of people say that a website is the biggest determining factor in whether they will trust a business or not. After all, getting people to trust you and what you do is one of the biggest advantages in getting leads. No trust, no clients.
Have you ever gone to search for a business that you’ve heard of, maybe you’ve seen their banner somewhere, or a sticker on a ute and nothing comes up? Or maybe just one old yellow page’s site with their contact number. You call, and no answer. They must be busy, and you’re not really going to sit around and wait for them, you move on.
That’s the reality these days. With the internet being so accessible, and customers being presented with so many options at their fingertips now, why would they stick around for a company that has no online presence.
When potential clients click on your website, they can see that your business is legit and professional, already swaying them towards using your company, before they’ve even scrolled down.
Easily Show Clients your Services and Answer FAQs
There’s nothing wrong with getting on the phone and having a chat with a potential client going over your services, in fact, it’s probably preferred that they have a chat with you. But what if, before that phone call they already knew all about your services, and they already knew where you were located and the areas you travel to.
They would be able to grab all of this information from looking at your site, so when they get on the phone they have a better idea of what they’re looking for and that phone call can be focused on working out a time to get the job done.
Having your services laid out clearly on the site is a great way to promote everything you do to a broad range of audiences. Remember, we’re living in a digital age where people jump online to look for trade jobs these days. If they’re searching for the services you provide, you want your site to come up, and you want them to know that you can do the job.
Give Clients an Access to your Previous Work
On your site, having a portfolio section or page is a valuable way to show clients your workmanship and the quality of service you can provide them. This creates another layer of trust between you and the client as they can easily see a section of previous jobs, and they know exactly what your skillsets are. This means, when clients book you, you’re already both on the same page in terms of the outcome.
If your business posts regularly on Instagram, you can even embed your feed into the site too so that the photos you post to Instagram will appear on the site also. This means your website always stays up to date without you having to constantly man it.
You can Fully Customise your Site
Your site can contain exciting visuals, great content, but also hold a lot of your companies personality in it too. Choose your colours, layout and how you want to present your company to your potential clients when building your site. Think about what pages you want and how you want people to navigate to each one.
You can include your logo in the header so no matter where on the site the guests go, they’ll always have your company name on their mind, and they’ll recognize your logo. Now if they see your banner or truck, they’ll know exactly who you are and where to find you.
There are so many things your site can do. This may sound overwhelming, but with a little bit of planning your site can be a reality in no time.
There are many digital agencies around that can work through the whole process with you, to make it a smooth and easy transition for your company.
Contact Forms
A handy thing that you can put into your site, is a contact form. You can put the necessary and relevant fields in, eg Name, Phone, Email, Enquiry so that anyone who wants to ask further questions or is ready for a quote, can fill this form out and it’ll get sent straight to your email. You can then call that client or email them with the relevant answers and get the ball rolling.
This means you don’t have to always be answering the phone, and you already know what you need to answer when you do speak to them, keeping the call efficient and productive. This is also a great way for clients to ask questions in their own time too. Say they’re looking at your site at 9 pm, they have a question, they can ask it straight away through your website. Instead of sleeping on it and forgetting to call you the next day. Again, these can be fully customizable and can appear anywhere on your site.
Ranking on Google
Okay so you’ve planned out your site, you know what you want it to include and show, you have a good idea of how you want it to look. Did you know you can also use the site to bring leads to you through Google ranking and SEO (search engine optimization)?
Think of it this way, if you’re an electrician company, and someone types into Google, ‘electrician near me’, there will be sites that appear first on the list. This can be you through website optimization. Remember, 46% of searches are local, there are bound to be a whole lot of people searching for your trade around you. By building your site with SEO in mind, your website can climb those rankings, and appear really early on for people searching. If your site is near the top of that list, you’ll get a lot of clicks. With your newly set up site that looks pleasing, it is easy to navigate and shows off your work and all of your services, more often then not, those clicks are going to convert into leads.
Conclusion
Your leads are your lifeline, and a website is a great way to get those leads, without being a physically demanding asset. Dedicate your time into having productive conversations with your clients. You’re creating a hub of your work, and everything your business can provide in an easily accessible place, that anyone can access at any time. Make the site personal to your business, rank higher on Google, get leads.
If you don’t know where to start, or maybe you have some ideas already written down, and you’re interested in building your site with SEO in mind, get in touch today to discuss the best way to get your website online.
