10 Common Website Mistakes

Website Common Mistakes

After doing 60 episodes in about 100 days, we will be moving to a one-episode per week timeline, publishing at 5 am on Wednesdays.

We’ll also be mainly changing an interview format with guests who can help give insights into running more efficient and profitable service businesses.

Today we’re going to talk about 10 Common Website Mistakes companies make that prevent them from generating the leads they want from their site.

1. No call-to-action (CTA) above the fold – in the visible screen that loads.

• Ask the visitor to take action!
• Help them get to what they need, want, and are searching for
• Use a button or text line
• a phone button
• contact us
• learn more
• get the free lead magnet
• grab it now
• join newsletter
• get started
• see more
• start now
• find out
• check it out
• get the [insert item]
• download now

Words we don’t like are, subscribe and sign up; both phrases have negative meanings.

Use positive action words instead.

2. No easy contact methods

– put your phone number at the top. Make it a click to call the number.

– add a contact form to every service page, with a custom thank you page liked we talked about in the last podcast.

3. No email capture or list building

There is a saying in digital marketing, “the money is on the list.”

Email is a powerful marketing tool that you should be using.

Email newsletters keep you connected to existing clients to grow repeat business, referrals, and customer reviews.

Email drip campaigns can be used as educational lead magnets to educate visitors on a topic they want to learn about.

And engaged email lists increase the asset value of your business.

Both offline and online ads can drive traffic to landing pages that offer a lead magnet, which is helpful to them in exchange for their email. Or it can offer a 5-day email series to educate them on that topic further.

As we said in our last podcast, many of your thank pages should also be inviting users to join your newsletter.

Integrating email into your website helps grow leads, customer loyalty, sales, referrals, and a valuable asset on your balance sheet.

4. No service pages

We often see home service companies that don’t have good service pages built out for every service they offer.

Or their service pages have little content on them.

Your site will never rank in Google for these services unless you have a well-built, in-depth specific page for each service you offer.

When someone searches Google or elsewhere for a specific service, only topically relevant pages stand a chance of ranking for that search.

So build out great service pages for each one of your services.

5. No content marketing, no blog

Having a website with just a home page, services pages, and a contact us page isn’t going to cut it either.

That’s the case for several reasons:

a) Those pages only appeal to the 5 -10% of people who are ready to buy your service.

The other 90+ percent want to learn more about it first. You’re missing out on all of them!

So if you’re not providing them good information about the solutions to their problems and desires, then someone else will ultimately get their business.

b) Informational pages are where you will get people willing to give you their email in exchange for helpful info.

This helps you build email lists and nurture people through the sales funnel journey to grow leads and your email list.

c) Informational pages can be used to create “topical silos,” which are a cluster of info pages about the same related main topic linked together and up to the main service pages about that topic. This greatly helps improve search rankings in Google.

d) Informational pages can be syndicated on social, Reddit, and other platforms to help attract and grow links to your content and website.

And links from other sites to yours are the number one ranking signal in Google. They power up the authority of your topical silos and entire website.

And your home page and service pages aren’t going to attract much in the way of links from other sites to yours.

6. No location pages

Service companies have a service area that reaches beyond the city they’re located in.

And to Google, everything local business is proximity-based.

So your Google Maps listing isn’t going to show up far from your office location and it’s definitely not going to show up in neighboring towns.

Your home page and service pages will have difficulty ranking outside your immediate city unless you’ve done a great job on topical silos and link building. Even then, if you have heavy competition in these neighboring towns, you’ll have challenges.

The answer is to build out unique city pages for the nearest bordering towns that are most important to you.

You may even need to build unique service pages for each city page and link them together as a city cluster.

Creating blog content about each town and linking to and from the city silo cluster is also a good idea.

7. No schema markup / structured data

This is unique code on each page that speaks directly to the robot crawlers of search engines and tells them what kind of business you are, where you are, what you offer, where your service area is, your hours open and contact info, what each page on your site is about, who the authors are, how everything is interrelated and much more.

Without this coding, it’s more difficult for these crawling bots to understand businesses, page content, and more.

Suppose you’ve invested the time, energy, and money into building a great lead generation website. In that case, it only makes sense to help search engines better understand your business, site, and its content.

With good schema markup on your pages, you’ll also be eligible for displaying rich results in search engine results pages, like FAQ data, review stars, and more.

We found many plugins that do a half-ass job of this, so I would recommend avoiding all of them.

The best solution we found is to use the advanced schema app from schemaapp.com. We’re not affiliates, but we are users.

It’s the only solution that offers every type of structured data item and code available and keeps it updated and current.

It’s also the only solution that lets you build all the interrelationships between the coding on each page, which is one of the key essentials to making schema markup work the best.

8. No reviews page and no 1st-party reviews

Studies show that nearly 9 out of 10 consumers will read reviews of a company before buying from them.

In addition to needing reviews on the platforms that matter to service companies, where Google is #1, followed by Yelp, and maybe HomeAdvisor, Angi, and others.

You also need 1st party reviews on your own website. These are the results of using a well-automated reputation management system, which allows for writing a review that gets embedded on your site.

1st party reviews are the only reviews eligible for rich results or review snippets, which are those reviews stars next to your site on search results pages.

You also need to display both 1st and 3rd party reviews on a reviews or testimonials page on your site, as well as on your home page.

You could also tag those 1st-party reviews by job type and city and display those that apply to specific service and city pages.

You want to provide links on your reviews page for people to leave a review on your site or Google also.

Overall, to be superior to your competitors, you need more reviews, better reviews, and better review velocity, keeping them coming regularly.

Google is the number one place to have great reviews because that’s where 90% or so of all people search.

Your website is the next most important place to show them off.

9. No case studies

Show people what the end result will be for them.

Show them your successes.

Detail out a few cases with before and after information.

Add any data and details that may apply.

Include a video testimonial from the client to make it more effective and real to the visitor.

This is especially true and effective for people considering larger jobs that carry high costs or a lot of demo work.

• Solar installs
• Bathroom remodels
• Water damage repairs
• Repipes
• New HVAC systems
• New roofs

Show off your work and let the happy customer tell other people how great you are!

10. No videos

For service companies especially, people want to connect to the owners and staff.

Have lots of team images on the website.

Consider including a business intro video on your about us page, maybe your home page, and explainer videos on your services pages.

You should have a video on your ads’ landing pages.

Be sure to add calls to action in your videos!

Testimonial videos from your clients are priceless!

Social proof is highly important to growing your business so let prospects see your happy customers telling them how great your company is.

Conclusion

Your website is not a brochure.

It can be an incredible lead generation machine in the digital world where everyone lives today.

But you have to give it the time, attention, and tools it needs to operate a peak efficiency.

And you have to provide the 90% of prospects who are not yet ready to buy with the information they need to make better decisions about the right solutions to their problems or desires.

Those helpful, informative articles are also the only ones that will attract links from other sites to yours, the #1 ranking factor in Google.