Imagine the scenario, you are an expert pro builder that renovates and refurbishes homes to make them more modern and up to date. You do a fantastic job time to time for your customers, but you lack the time and expertise to properly get your business online and the website you do have lacks in quite a few areas.
Is your website mobile friendly?
Firstly if you are online and have a builders website, make sure your website works across all platforms. Gone are the days when you only need it to work on a desktop computer, in 2018 over 65% of people use a mobile device, a mobile device might be an Apple iPhone or a larger Samsung phone. A potential customer will find you and go straight to your website and it is isn’t mobile friendly and responsive, you may loose a chance of an inquiry.
Lets talk about page speed..
Yes we live in a 4g world now, and the Internet speed in most people’s homes is pretty quick. But if your website is packed with huge sized image files, even the very best broadband will struggle and it will seem like an eternity for a website to load up!
Simply make sure when you take a picture, when you send it to your website developer you ask them to make sure the image is re-sized for online purposes. Even search online yourself for some software or tweak it from within your phone. No one likes a slow website!
Design, Design, Design
No website has to be perfect, no website should be cluttered. As a building and refurbishment contractor you will no doubt have some very good images of before and after works completed. This could be a whole house renovation job, or maybe simply re-fitting a kitchen.
But always keep your imagery simple, and use them to sell your services. Don’t get too clever and take silly or fancy images, it will only put the potential customer off calling you.
Your website could even be cluttered with too much wording, and no images at all. We suggest having over 60% of a homepage having imagery as this best sells your business. A builders website should be vivid, not boasting or boring!
The last marketing mistake
Imagine you’ve paid for a all singing and dancing website, and you sit there waiting for the calls to come in. Most of the time nowadays they won’t unless you really have a niche service, which is unheard nowadays.
Every website online will require some marketing of some sort to get going. Put yourself in your potential customers view, how do they find you? Simply put they can’t, unless you do some marketing works.
For any builder, decorator, plumber or any other local trade, it’s best to start targeting people close to where you run your business. For a builder, I would expect some sitting down on there phone to go to Google and perform a search using either ‘builders Hampshire’ or ‘builders in Hampshire area’. This would be my first point of call, then if your website sits on page one of Google you stand a great chance of grabbing some business. Also remembering the frequent website mistakes builders make and how best to avoid them as we went through above.
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