Organized And Waiting
Here’s the problem: Your brand is not only what you do best but all the things you do. That might include projects you specialize in, additional services you offer (handyman, for instance), the people who work for your company, and the steps that you and your clients will move through as the project is designed and built. It might also, one expert suggests, include feedback from your delighted customers. “Too often, when I go to remodeling sites, I see things and not people,” Gould says. His suggestion: Put testimonials up-front. “What customers identify with are the people who have done business with you and how their lives have benefited from that.”
But pile all that on your home page and you risk overwhelming visitors. On the other hand, if you streamline it into a few crisp paragraphs framing endless before-and-after photos, you lose the keywords and links that push you to the forefront of organic search.
Ideally, you want to include lots of information about who you are and what you do. The site, experts say, should be friendly, fun, and interesting. But, more than anything else, it should be easy to navigate.
Many companies organize their website information under five or six broad subject headings. MainStreet Design Build, for instance, breaks its site into: About Us, Gallery, Design, Resource Center, and Contact Us. People who arrive on the home page can quickly find and click through to what interests them. The Resources section is chock-full of Frequently Asked Questions, both useful and loaded with keywords.
Actionable Intelligence
If you’re thinking about having your site redesigned and optimized, remember to do the following: Count clicks. So how do you know that your company’s website is effective? Lead tracking is one way. But a site lives and breathes. It can change when you want it to, in the ways that you want it to, depending on not only how often visitors come but how long they stay and what they look at.
Programs such as Google Analytics or Alexa — both free downloads — tell you how many visitors are coming to your site and how they behave when they get there. They also point to ways in which you can improve site design and content.
Diane Menke, project manager and chief operations officer for Myers Constructs, in Philadelphia, tracks reports weekly, courtesy of host server DCANet. She combines this information with results from Emma Inc., an e-mail newsletter and marketing campaign service that reports on who opens e-mail newsletters. Menke says that she is looking at who’s looking, how often, and how useful the site is to the viewer. Counts go up when the company has had press or has published its e-newsletter. Menke says that she is particularly interested in whether or not viewing the site makes visitors more inclined to sign with the company.
Web marketing expert Gamse suggests that business owners familiarize themselves with analytics programs and manage their sites accordingly. “You have to have someone who can look at those numbers and create actionable intelligence,” she says.
How often do you check the reports? Weekly, monthly, or daily? “Daily, if you’re running a paid search campaign,” Gould suggests. “If you don’t get a response, you need to figure out why, so you can get a response.”
Give your address. Search engines look for geographical terms. That’s why it’s important that your company’s name, address, phone number, and an e-mail address occur not just on the home page but on every page, including the pages under subheadings.
MainStreet Design Build, for instance, includes its address on every page of its website. The phrase, “Birmingham, Michigan,” is small and inconspicuous — you’d have to be looking to notice it — but including it that many times makes it more likely that someone in Birmingham looking for a remodeling company is going to find the Ramaekers’ site. Gehman Custom Remodeling, in Harleysville, Pa., has a darker colored section at the bottom of each Web page that contains not only its hours of operation, contact info, and certifications, but also says, “We service these communities,” and then proceeds to name all 74 of them.
Take names. Building a database that you can reach out to with offers and promotions is a critical part of the Web marketing picture, enabling the site to do more than just passively relay brand information. But to do that you must take names or, in this case, e-mail addresses, from the people who arrive on your website.
Say they’re not ready to call you yet. What can you give them that they’re willing to exchange their e-mail address for, so that you can stay in touch with them? One excellent tradeoff is an e-newsletter that arrives on a regular basis with news items relevant to remodeling, home maintenance, or your company.
Gamse suggests that another way to capture an e-mail address is to add a live chat function — you communicate with visitors to your website using an intuitive instant messenger interface — so that someone from your office can contact a visitor after a certain period of time to ask if he or she has any questions or would like an estimate.
