“I need to get a website built, but I don’t know where to start.”
Getting a website built can be a bit tricky if you don’t really know what you’re doing.
There’s a number of different things you need to worry about, but the first one is: What’s the actual purpose of your website?
There can be multiple purposes, but assuming that most people watching this video are builders and contractors, there’s really only a couple of purposes – first one being credibility and the second one being lead capture.
- Credibility – What are the essentials to credibility?
- About Us – You need to have an About Us page and it should talk to the client about what you do, who you are, why you are in business, some of your credibility, time or length in business.
- Before and After Photos and Videos – This should show your credibility, what you got in the way of before and after photo. What’s before, what’s after.
- Testimonials – If you can ideally do it, put testimonials under the before and after photos. But the objective is, before and after photos with a testimonial add so much more credibility. Or even better still, if you can get a video of the testimonial, with the client standing in front of the camera saying how good you were, singing your praise, and you put that up there, it gives it so much more credibility because a video – people know that they are not doctored or can assume that they are not doctored. They are harder to doctor than they are if you write something up. But the idea is to have some good quality before and after photos with a testimonial from a client.
- Contact Details – One of the biggest pet peeves I have is having a website, you go to the website and all you got is a form to fill in. There’s no contact phone numbers, they might have an email address there, but it’s like they’re trying to put this big barrier between you and them. So the idea here is to have clear contact details, have a phone number, have your forms there to fill in. An example of this is when I was looking for a Facebook company to do some marketing for us, when I went to their page all they had was a “Contact Us” form. They put up these barriers and the only way you could do is fill up this Contact Us form… they had no address, they had no details whatsoever about where they are, who they were. So I just walked away, there was no way I was going to deal with that company.
- Good Content – Have good content in your website. The content needs to be speaking to your client about their fears, frustrations, wants and aspirations. Don’t make it all about “me” and “we” and “how we do all these sort of stuff”, make it about them and what are they going to achieve, what are they going to get as a result. Have a good headline that addresses their fears, frustrations, wants and aspirations.
- Offer – It could be a downloadable report, it could the 7, 10, 15 or 20 mistakes that people make when choosing a builder, some sort of report or giveaway. Or maybe a consultation where you want to do a consultation with a client, rather than calling them “free” quotes or estimates, do a consultation with them, add a value on it, and offer it free. Something like that, some sort of offer on the website to be able to get to take action when they’re there.
- Lead Capture – If you got downloadable reports, you capture the leads and put them on what we call Buyers Journey – there are Future buyers, Soon buyers and Now buyers – so when they download the report you can put them on the Buyers Journey and you can move them along, understanding where they are on the Buyers Journey and send them information to show why you’re the person they should be dealing with.
Two Styles of SEO
Another mistake people make with building websites is they think they build it and they will come. The thing is, you got to have people come to your website from search engine optimization or what they call SEO. There are two styles of SEO; on-site SEO and off-site SEO.
- On-site SEO – The keywords. Having good content that matches the keywords that people type in to Google, Bing or Yahoo when they are doing a search for you or doing a search for a builder or a contractor. You got to have good keyword content on your website. The only thing you can really do with your website is to really make it search engine optimized, to be able to attract people from the Google searches.
- Off-site SEO – This is where companies can charge you a lot of money for this sort of stuff. You have articles out that drive people into your website, you have YouTube that drives people to your website, you have a content out there that drives people back into your website, your Facebook, your social media, drives people back into your website. Social media is another good thing for SEO, it’s a good tool to be used because it shows so much more credibility. If you set up your website with before and after photos, you could actually use your social media to show people your progress on the job. And that’s another thing too, you get interaction with your social media.
If you build a website and you don’t do anything with the search engine optimization or any of those sort of tools to be able to drive traffic there, it ends up being just like a billboard in the desert. You got these big billboard there where you might get one or two cars drive pass there in a day. What you need to do is be able to drive traffic to your website to be able to get a result.
Offline Marketing
Another good way of doing that is offline marketing.
If you got offline marketing, you can reduce the amount of offline marketing so instead of having a big ad, now you can have a small ad that drives people into your website. Then the website does all the selling for you.
If you don’t know where to start with your website, we do websites now after some challenges that some of our clients had with their website development companies.
There are so many website development companies out there, where they will promise you the world and they don’t deliver. I’ve got a client who’s going through this process now, he paid $1500 for a website and eight months later he still hasn’t got the website up and going.
So we reluctantly dive into doing websites because we were doing our own website for years because we couldn’t find a decent developer. We had actually recommended a couple of other guys, didn’t work out, so we decided to do it ourselves.
