You run a remodeling contracting business. You’re not an internet expert. But you have a website and you know it’s an important marketing tool. If you feel it’s underperforming, how do you pinpoint what’s wrong? Here’s a quick checklist that can at least help you diagnose some common issues that local businesses have with their websites.
Is your site smart enough for smart phones?
More than half of the traffic on the web these days comes from users on mobile devices. If your website is hard to use on a mobile device then visitors are likely going to ditch your site in favor of some other contractor who has one that’s easy to use. Worse yet, if your site’s not mobile friendly you might be getting punished by Google and the other search engines. If users can’t even find you, there’s not much point in having a website at all.
Want to check if your site is mobile friendly? Try Google’s mobile friendly test.
If you find that your site isn’t mobile friendly, you’ll want to talk to some developers to see if your current site can be converted or if they can build you a new one that is. Talk to several companies before you choose one to go with to make sure you’re getting a new price. If your site’s fairly small this shouldn’t cost an arm and a leg.
The tortoise does not beat the hare in 2017
We developed the JobFLEX remodeling estimating software because we know that your remodeling customers want quick responses to requests for quotes and they want a job done in a timely fashion. Not surprisingly, they also want your site to load quickly so they can find the information they need. If every page on your site takes a long time to load, your customers will find another contractor whose website can get them the information they need more quickly.
Just like the issue with being mobile friendly, a slow site can also knock you down Google’s rankings. If your site is taking up too much of Google’s time when their automated bots crawl your site, they’ll punish you by dropping you below your competitors with snappier sites. Don’t believe us? Here’s Google’s head of search Matt Cutts covering this topic all the way back in 2010.
Is your site fast enough? Check your pages’ speed versus your competitors on any one of these tools:
If you find your website is unbearably slow, send the results from these tests to your web company and see if they can implement some of the recommended fixes. Ideally, they’ll be able to speed things up for you to get you in a better spot than your competitors, or at least in line with them.
Is your information accurate?
One way that contractors can unknowingly lose a lot of business is by not updating their business information around the web. If, like many businesses, you’ve changed addresses and phone numbers over the years there’s a good chance that your old data is still floating around the web. Many websites let users add company information or they scrape data from other websites, so it’s easy for incorrect information to be spread around the web. If your Yelp profile has the wrong phone number, potential customers could very well be calling that number. If your old addresses are still out there you may have customers sending checks to the wrong location.
Again, having incorrect information can also hurt your visibility with the search engines. If Google or Bing sees your company name listed with three different phone numbers at four different addresses, they’re not going to have much confidence in showing your company in search results. If they’re choosing between your site’s disparate information and other companies’ who have a consistent name, address and phone number around the web it stands to reason the search engines are going to have more faith in putting them on top of their listings.
How do you find this incorrect info? A quick way to check for inaccurate data is to do a Google search for your old phone numbers and addresses. If you put it in parentheses, that will help zero in Google’s results. So, you may want to try a few searches of variations to see what sites have out of date information. So, for example, if your old phone number was: 555-454-5555 you might try some searches like:
- “555-454-5555”
- “(555) 454-5555”
- 555-454-5555
- (555) 454-5555
That should help you turn up anything in Google’s database related to that old number.
Another helpful free tool is Moz Local. This does some of the legwork for you to see if your data is consistent across some of the major local websites like Google+, Facebook, Foursquare and YellowPages.com.
If you find that there’s a lot of out of date information around the web, you’ll want to look into the options on these sites to edit your listings. Some of these sites will let you verify your ownership and then edit the listings, others may require you to contact them or jump through a few more hoops before they’ll change the listings.
Time to kick the tires on your own site
We’ve provided you the tools, now you just need to follow the instructions above and see how your site stacks up versus your main competitors. If you’ve got a major problem in any of these areas you could be costing yourself more money than you realize!
