As a contractor of any kind, you need a good website if you want to pull in potential customers, generate leads, and ultimately convert them to clients. “With the majority of advertising done on the internet nowadays, having a good website for your contracting business can be the difference between succeeding and failing,” says Chuck Waltman of Houston Home Remodeling Pros.
There are a variety of features you need to have on a contracting website to give yourself the best chance of landing clients. So, in case you run a contracting business like a roofing company or a construction company, let’s take a look at 5 things we consider must-haves for anybody building their contractor website.
1. A Good Template
When you’re building any contractor website, you first need to choose the template you’re going to use and where it’s going to be hosted. You’ve probably heard of sites like these that offer you hosting and a choice of templates for a monthly fee.
Though, most of the generic web hosting platforms you see aren’t actually specialized for contractors. Moreover, if you stop paying your monthly fee, your entire website will be taken down and you’ll have to start over from scratch.
There are, however, sites like 247PRO that offer specially designed templates for contractors in particular. They offer pre-templates designs that contain home, about us, contact form, gallery, teams pages.
If the content is ready it would take approximately 10-15 min to create a site and set it live. This is great for contractors who want to avoid the often lengthy setup process with other templates and provides everything you need to get up and running when it comes to contractor website design.
“Choosing the right template for yourself is critical because everything else in your sales funnel will lead to your main website, it’s basically your online headquarters,” says Jeff Guthrie of Phoenix Roofing Contractors. Not only this, but the hosting platform you choose will determine what kind of security your site has and how fast it loads as well.
2. Professionalism
Professionalism is key when it comes to building a construction website, roofing website, or any other type of contractor website. The jobs you complete will generally be high-paying, important projects for people so your customers want to know they can rely on you to get the job done right, the first time. Making sure your layout looks clean and gets the main points across quickly is important.
In general, you want people to be able to land on your website and immediately know what you offer and how they can move forward with you. Having a unique look will also help you stand out and be remembered if they choose to browse a bunch of different sites before making a decision.
3. Focus on Mobile First
While having a good desktop site is important for those who use laptops and desktop computers to search for services, mobile is more important. Most people search for everything on mobile devices now, so you need to prioritize your mobile site over your desktop site if you want to have more success.
This means making sure the content is easily visible on mobile devices and all the links and buttons are clickable and functioning. There are mobile-friendly tests you can find online to test your mobile site, or you can perform a manual review by accessing your mobile site through different types of devices.
You should inspect for the text that’s not properly formatted, non-functioning links, images that aren’t fully displayed, and any structural issues that are likely to frustrate a user and cause them to leave.
Another benefit of having a well-designed mobile site is that your site will pop up higher on search engines like Google. This is because as the popularity of mobile sites has increased, Google and other search engines have now altered their algorithm to reward mobile-friendly sites.
4. SEO
While a large part of your marketing efforts should be focused on pay-per-click ads, when it comes to your website, SEO can help you a ton if you want to generate traffic via a search engine.
There are many different aspects to SEO, so you’ll have to do your research to find out what relevant keywords are trending the most among your target demographic. Once you identify high-priority keywords, you can then begin incorporating them into your website content.
While you can fit a few into your service descriptions and other pages, it’s best to start a blog to maximize your SEO potential. By starting a blog centered on how-to guides and other useful information related to your industry, you can fit keywords into the main text, as well as meta-tags and page descriptions.
Just be sure to make your blog content actually valuable, don’t just use it as an opportunity to fit as many keywords on a page as possible. That’s called keyword stuffing and most search engine algorithms can detect it, and they’ll penalize you in the rankings for it.
5. Pull Out all the Stops for Converting Visitors
Once you get people to your page, there are many different tactics you can use to get them to at least give you an email address, if not buy your services right then and there. Once you have their email you can market to them in the future.
Pop-ups that appear as a person as is about the exit the page is one conversion tactic that a general contractor website should use. Another is live chat software that can direct them to a representative in real-time.
Forms for visitors to enter questions and contact info are another, as well as calendar booking apps. You should also have your business phone number easily visible. Utilizing all of these tactics on your website is a tried-and-true method of converting visitors into customers.
Potential Clients Have Specific Needs for You to Meet
If you want to reach the average person in need of a contractor for construction work, roofing work, or any type of contracted labor, your website needs to meet some criteria. First, it needs to have an easy-to-navigate layout, and you can achieve this by hosting it on a web hosting site that is designed specifically for contractors, like 247pro.
It should also be clean-cut and professional-looking, with good reviews in plain sight if you have them. You should also prioritize your mobile site above your desktop version because that’s where most of the traffic is now. Also, start a blog to maximize your SEO efforts and rank higher in search engine results.
Finally, use all the converting tactics we mentioned to get info from potential customers and make it easy for them to initiate a purchase from you. If you can manage to check every item on this checklist, you should start raking in new customers in no time.
