Is your tradesperson website getting poor traffic? Is it not pulling in as many leads as you want? Has digital marketing for your business gotten you a little stressed out?
Don’t pull the plug on your website just yet! You have a service people need and there are certainly potential customers looking for your business on the web. The issue is they’re just not finding you. But with some effort, a hammer and nails, and a little coding, your online marketing issues are solvable problems.
To help, here are our best tips for what to do if your tradesperson website is getting poor traffic:
- Have us perform a free website health check
- Invest in SEO for your website
- Get a Google my business account
- Ensure your website not too image heavy
- Consider how else you’re promoting your website
Have us perform a free website health check
If your website isn’t seeing as many visitors as you would like, it’s probably because search engines are tucking it away on page six, whereas you want to get your website up to pages one or two. This is where most customers will search for their contractor – even though this is not necessarily where the best businesses are. However, businesses on search engine pages beyond about five see very little traffic, so it’s in your best interest to improve your ranking.
This is where our free website health check comes in to help. We can get one of our team members can search through your website, identify parts of it that need optimising for search engines and generate you a report with this information. This can include making sure it’s mobile friendly, identifying features that might be causing a poor loading time, checking for broken images or links and guiding you through any areas of your website that might be causing a poor user experience. Every part of your website needs to be considered when trying to drive more traffic towards your business.
With our advice and a few quick fixes, we can make a start on solving your problems and your website will be in good stead to begin climbing the ranks of Google and gaining more traffic.
Invest in SEO (or at least make sure you’ve used keywords)
The issue with SEO is that it’s changing all the time. This means that performing effective SEO on your website yourself is a difficult task and finding the best information can be time consuming and complex. However, when you’re ready, utilizing the talents of a digital marketing company will raise your Google ranking and send more traffic to your site.
If you’re not quite ready to invest in SEO services just yet, there are certainly some bits and pieces you can do yourself. Choose yourself a keyword (Google’s keyword planner is one good way to do this). A keyword needs to be the term your target audience is putting into their search engine; so if your business is that you’re a plumber based in Bradford, it’s likely ‘Bradford plumber’ would likely be the best keyword search term for you.
Once you’ve chosen your keyword, you need to include it in your website’s content. Use it to rename image files that are on your site, have it written in titles and ensure it’s in your meta description (the description under a Google result telling the customer what that result is about).
Get a Google my business account
Get yourself a Google My Business Account. It’s quick and easy to do and lends your business more credibility. Most importantly, it helps boost your SEO. The statistics show that customers are 70% more likely to visit businesses with a complete Google My Business listing and that businesses with them have seen a significant uptick visitors to their website.
Ensure your website’s not too image heavy
Having examples of your work on your site is a great idea. Your potential customers want to see examples of your best work and experience. However, image laden websites can be sluggish to load. As humanity gets used to the luxury of super fast fibre optic broadband, they may be unwilling to wait, and so quit your site before they’ve given it a chance. If this is happening, you need to reduce the image content on your site, or at least the size of the files. When ranking sites, Google looks at the average length of time a user spends on a website. So the more users that quickly navigate away from your page, the less likely Google is to rank you higher.
Websites heavy with image content are also not favoured by search engines. Search engines need text, so that they understand what your website is about and whether it’s the right choice to display in search results for its user.
Consider how else you’re promoting your website
If your tradesperson website is getting poor traffic, you might want to consider where else you’re promoting it.
Search engine optimisation can take a while to start working. So instead, you might want to look at using Google Adwords campaigns. A Google Ads campaign, if well managed, can have a quick return. Social media is also a good way to direct traffic towards your website, as long as you’re keeping it up to date with content.
If it’s not already on your listing, your website should definitely be in your checkatrade contact details too!
To cover all your bases, in the offline world, the best promotion can come from having your branding on your van and on lawn signs (just make sure your contact details and website address are prominent on them!).
Now you know what to do if your tradesperson website is getting poor traffic
Take the time to start implementing the information that we’ve outlined for you, and get to work on making your website the best it can be! Soon you’ll be turning up in search results as potential customers discover your website. If you need further help or information for your online marketing, we’re always happy to answer every question we get over our enquiries email or on any of our social media, such Twitter or Instagram.
