Business within a modern world usually cannot be solely based on sharing business cards and word of mouth, an online presence is essential for building clientele and an opportunity for potential clients to verify the legitimacy of your business.
The online trading environment is highly competitive and therefore setting time aside to design and format a professional website will help your business stand out, especially when potential clients are comparing traders and ultimately assist to gain business.
We will be discussing the essential content to include, the ideal formatting and the favourable planned structure for your website in order to generate quality leads and attract new business, but first let’s cover off what a conversation rate actually is.
What is a Conversion Rate for a Website?
Simply put, the conversion rate of a website is the percentage of website visitors that take up the desired action. Typically, a website would generate lots of traffic and therefore a good conversion rate could be between 2 and 5 percent.
Must Have Content to Include on your Tradesman Website
A tradesman’s website should be built with the ideal customer in mind, providing useful content in an easy to read, professional tone.
The sole trader or company should be introduced so that the business is personable to potential customers as well as being transparent so that the business is deemed more trustworthy. In addition, providing photos of staff that may visit customers in their homes can help reassure clients of the staff identities and professionalism.
A company’s website should also be treated as a platform to promote any professional accreditations including enrolment to any professional bodies or award nominations or successes. The logos of such bodies or awards should be included on the website in order to reassure potential customers that the business is legitimate, professional and trustworthy.
It is recommended that testimonials are uploaded, providing feedback of work undertaken, demonstrating that the company is capable and provides a high level of customer service. Ideally testimonial should be recent and of jobs undertaken within the local area so they resonate with the potential customers browsing the website.
If resources allow, mixed media can be included on the website, providing engaging content to visitors. Videos for example, provide another method of demonstrating the company’s personality, professional and examples of quality of work.
In addition, blogs can be great to provide further value to excisions and potential customers, sharing knowledge of the industry or tasks undertaken, however resource needs to be set aside in order to provide fresh content on a regular basis.
Favourable Formatting and Website Structure
Familiar Formatting and Inclusion of Company Logos
Any company’s website should be formatted to match any other branding already in place such as company logos, colour ways or fonts selected for use on business cards or vehicle branding in order to present a streamlined marketing approach that potential customers may be familiar with.
Sensible Website Layout that is Easy to Navigate
Depending on the nature of the services offered, potential customers may need to access the site and contact information quickly in an emergency such as a plumbing leak or being locked out of a property, requiring a locksmith for example and therefore the layout of the site needs to be well thought out and easy to navigate.
One suggestion in order to increase the simplicity of the layout of a company website and therefore increasing the user-friendly website attributions, is to create a separate page for each service offered by the company.
Contact Details Availability
A useful tip is to add a contact form on every page of your website so that potential customers viewing the content on the pages can easily and seamlessly request further information or submit an enquiry, without having to hunt for contact details or open another application to make contact such as email.
On a similar note, building a click to call phone number on every page provides browsers an instant method of contact in order to immediately request a service or check availability.
Some customers prefer to liaise over the phone and therefore may prefer not to use contact forms and therefore a click to call button will provide immediate contact details and display that you are open for business.
As we discussed Sam Price from gas boiler installation startup Heatable, having multiple contact points available via your website is crucial:
“We noticed that when we installed our chatbot, our conversions increased by almost 50%”.
“It’s not only allows to provide superb customer service, a reputation we are proud of, but it’s one of the best lead magnets we have integrated onto the site.”
Further still, providing a chat bot to the website will give potential customers another method of contact directly from the website.
However, when considering a chat bot, ensure that sufficient resources are available in order to provide prompt responses to any incoming chat messages and that the chat bot auto-responses are sensible so that customers are not left waiting for responses or are frustrated by the automated service.
Speed of Website Pages Loading
Similar to the reasons to have a sensible website layout, potential customers will expect the website pages to load instantly. Websites that have loads of photos or complicated animations that slow down the time it takes for the website to load or refresh can cause frustration to potential customers, deterring them from continuing to navigate the website and therefore potentially loosing the lead and ultimately sales.
Website Offers and a Call to Action
Providing additional incentives for website users to proceed with purchase or to book a service appointment can increase the conversion rate. Such incentives could include a freebie or discount, encouraging potential customers to commit to booking or purchasing.
Time sensitive offers can help further by creating a feeling of urgency for website visitors to take up an offer. However, a business must prepare in advance of a advertising such an offer to ensure that the necessary resources will be in place ready to fulfil an increase of demand so that new customers receive a good service.
In addition, ensuring that the website tools are activated for users to apply a ‘call to action’ or CTA to place an order or book a consultation seamlessly via the use of buttons for example, to instantly proceed will also increase a websites conversion rate.
Continuous Development of the Website
Time and resources should be set aside to complete ongoing analysis of the website assessing the traffic to the site and monitoring any issues. There are a range of tools available to help undertake analysis and monitoring including website analytics. Analytics are usually available from the website provider themselves or via external companies such as Google.
Testing can also be set up in order to assess alternative proposals for page changes in order to measure the effectiveness of the content or design, known as A/B testing or alternative business testing. The process of A/B testing enables data to be collated on the alternative website page(s), to select the most successful option.
As we have also mentioned throughout this article, the website content needs to be up to date and accurate and therefore time will need to be set aside to create such content.
Such website development can be outsourced should the company not have the time or expertise internally.
Summary
We have been covering a range of hints and tips for tradesmen to create easy to navigate, useful websites for potential customers, that are also successful in conversion of website traffic into sales. We have discussed desirable website content, layout, formatting, and other tools such as ‘call to action’ buttons and website analytics that can all assist the success of the website.
In addition, we have also covered essential content that should be included to convey authenticity and professionalism of the business to reassure website users of the legitimacy of the business.
