Residential Contractor Website Benefits | General Contractor

There are a variety of residential contractor website benefits you should consider as part of your company’s overall marketing strategy. If you don’t have one, it’s definitely time to reconsider this omission. If you do have one, it is time to reevaluate how your company is leveraging your marketing investment.

You Should Have a Contractor Website

There are currently more than 680,000 commercial and residential contractors in the US. The US remodeling market is expected to exceed $410 Billion by 2023 according to Global Market Insights Inc. This is a large pie of potential revenue.

This means there is lots of competition for potential clients, whether at the local level or nationwide. To reach out to these potential clients obligates a residential contractor to invest in a highly visible, professional Internet website presence.

Here are a variety of residential contractor website benefits for you to consider:

1 – Improve Business Credibility

As mentioned, the residential contractor market of construction, remodeling and upgrading is growing. When a homeowner or business begins their planning of these activities, they will invariably turn to the Internet.

Your residential contractor website is your primary online business address. Without it you won’t be found and considered by potential customers who begin their investigation using the Internet.

At a minimum your residential contractor website will consist of three main pages of content:

• Home Page – This identifies your company’s brand and value proposition:
• About Page – Tells visitors all about your business, products and services;
• Contact Page – Informs those with interest how to get in touch with you.

Your Website is the “Hub” of your online presence. Everything revolves from it. Your residential contractor website should not be confused for a social media company page in LinkedIn or Facebook.

Rather, social media is a marketing tool to promote your company. It offers many benefits, and should complement your website presence.

Your website, domain, Email, etc. are company branded, completely under your control, and provide more credibility to potential clients. Alternatively your social media business page is subject to the ever changing policies of a third-party business, particularly as related to advertisement and content.

2 – Enhance Online Internet Presence

Approximately half the world’s population of 7.4 billion people are online daily. This number is expected to increase as mobile technology is increasingly used to interact with the Internet. Your residential contractor website benefits your company as an engine for increasing revenue from this expanding base of potential clients.

Because of this technology transition to mobile, your current website needs to be a mobile responsive website. This allows your website to be accessed from your PC as well as mobile devices like smartphones and tables. Because online traffic is now more than 65% from mobile devices, the major Internet search engines, like Google, place greater importance that your website is mobile friendly.

Your potential clients use the Internet when they are looking for residential contractors. However it is the Internet search engines that determine which websites are deemed “relevant and worthy” for their attention. The better the design and content of your website, the better the search results and potential clients.

If you don’t have a residential contractor website, the search engines don’t know that you exists, and neither will those potential clients looking on the Internet for your type of services.

And, unlike your physical office location, your Internet website is open every day, all the time, including holidays. Your sales prospects often do their Internet investigations off-hours, when your “regular business” is closed. With your Internet website, you offer year round presence, whenever a sales prospect might be investigating a home improvement project.

3 – Relationship with Your Market

Your business is an evolving entity that changes with time. It interacts daily with potential customers, existing customers and former customers. Your residential contractor website allows you to extend and nurture these relationships to foster loyalty, repeat business and word of mouth customer referrals.

Educating your market as to “Who You Are” via Blog articles allows communication at a more personal level versus the website online company brochure. Invite your audience to comment on articles or participate in surveys. These comments may be the source of customer referrals, a key element in creating credibility in any business.

A key residential contractor website benefit to its audience is the content that is usable and relevant to their needs as homeowners. This content can range from suggestions on home maintenance, how improvement projects increase home value, the proper homeowner expectations during the project execution, etc.

Ask yourself whether the content is about your audience and their needs or about your company. Follow the 80-20 Rule where 80% of the content is about them and 20% about your company. You will find that this results in getting returning visitors.

Pictures, pictures, and more pictures.

A residential contractor needs to sell the idea of a home improvement project to a sales prospect. The visual medium of photos and videos, before and after, allows your website to explain “why we are different” , “why you can trust us” with your home and money, and “why it is a good investment” for the future.

A residential contractor website is an ideal vehicle to showcase your work. There is no limit to the number of pages in your portfolio you can dedicated to home improvement projects.

4 – Business Investment, Not A Cost

The core residential contractor website benefit is to generate income for your company. It serves as a sales funnel where there is the series of steps your website visitor takes from the initial page view to ultimate purchase.

You start with a lot of potential customers who may have heard of residential contracting services. A smaller part of that group may want to learn more, and a smaller part of that group may actually contact you.

As
the process goes on, you’re talking to fewer people who are more
interested, until you end up with the people who become customers.

Your Internet website serves to attract potential customers by being “found” on the Internet via search engines. Those potential customers that visit your website self-select whether they have interest in spending time investigating your company and services.

They may visit your website multiple times, over an extended period of time, before taking any type of action to contact your company. When your website visitor does reach this point in their “sales journey”, their reaching out to you will vary.

This is also your company’s first test of credibility. How you respond creates that important “first impression”. That may be via your website Contact Us page, a request for an information brochure, a sign up to your monthly newsletter, a visit to your blog or a telephone inquiry.

How your sales staff responds to your initial Internet website inquiries, their responses to a sales prospect’s “no”, their consistency of contact follow ups and how quickly they respond to a visitor prospect inquiry are all factors that will determine your return on your Internet website investment.

The most elegant residential contractor website offers little benefit if the back-end sales process doesn’t convert interested visitors into paying customers for the company.

Conclusion – Residential Contractor Website Benefits

A residential contractor website benefits your company in a variety of ways. It is your business storefront on the Internet and should be central to your all your marketing activities. Social media and traditional forms of marketing should complement your website investment.

Your website is your business hub. It is like the sun, where your other marketing activities are the planets. It serves to filter the universe of potential homeowner Internet inquiries to produced qualified prospects for your sales personnel to convert into paying customers.

For additional information on home improvement leads for residential contractors and how they can help you grow your business, please Contact Us for a free, no obligation conversation.

REVISED: 2019-11-09