Steps to Ensure Your Website is Set For Success
Building a website is one of the most beneficial things you can do for your plumbing, heating or HVAC business. In the current day and age, 97% of potential customers look at a website before making a buying decision. We’re not going to get into the importance of a website in this article, but the fact of the matter is that a website for your business is as essential as having a business card. A website allows customers to contact you, to learn more about your company, builds credibility and provides a positive impression on future customers. Whether you have a website or not, following are tips to help ensure your website (or future site) is built for success.
Display You Phone Number & Email Address
This sounds like a no-brainer but customers need a way to get in touch with you. Having general information about your company easily visible on the website is extremely ideal. The phone number and email address associated with your plumbing, heating or HVAC business needs to be one of the first things on the site for customers to see. If this information is not viewable on the website, the customers will not know how to contact your business to hire you for their furnace repair or air conditioning installation.
Have Your Service Area Outlined - What Towns Do You Work In?
Many customers search for local plumbing, heating and HVAC businesses online, this means optimizing your website and Google My Business is essential for organic success. Not sure what Google My Business is? Read about here! Google knows how to identify location specific searches and can generate local businesses onto Google Maps. Google My Business is a free tool that Google offers to businesses to enhance customer experiences when searching for local services.
Now for the website. Where your company provides its plumbing, heating and cooling services should be displayed on your site so customers searching for your plumbing, heating or HVAC business can find your company in their area. For example, when a customer searches for “HVAC company near me”, if your service area is not outlined, your business will not pop up for the searcher. When your service area is outlined correctly, it ultimately produces more leads and future clients for your business – which really is the main goal here!
What Brands Does Your Company Work On?
Including the brands you work on and with, or having an entire brand page built out dedicated to this, is important for search engines and to your customers. As an HVAC business do you have extensive knowledge on Daikin products? Do the master plumbers that work for your company love to work with the brand Kohler? If this is the case, having a brand page to showcase all the different types of brands you work with will further cement your company’s legitimacy.
Think about if a customer has a specific brand item in their home they need servicing too, they will most likely first search for that on Google. For example, let’s say they search for “Daikin mini split repair near me”. If your heating or HVAC company has its service area outlined, and the brand the customer is searching for listed out, your company will most likely appear for that specific Google search.
Mobile Optimization
A great question to ask yourself is: Can customers access my website via their phone? As many know, most people spend their time searching on their mobile devices rather than a desktop computer. Mobile devices now provide up to 70% of all global website traffic. That is a crazy statistic and if your site is not optimized for these devices, the photos and text will be all over the page, or even cut off, making it extremely difficult for users to navigate. This ultimately would lead to a large bounce rate from users and low website traffic. A bounce rate is known as the percentage of visitors that leave your website after only viewing the first page. Google, and its robots, are aware of this, and takes into account just how mobile friendly your website actually is. Ensuring your website is able to be responsive on a mobile device will reduce that bounce rate. So when wondering why your site may not be at the top of Google’s search results, this issue may be one.
Core Services You Offer
A dedicated page to your businesses core services is a great way to show future clients exactly what your company offers. Having a page explaining exactly what you do will benefit customers by giving them essential information when they are looking to hire a plumbing, heating or HVAC company for a specific commercial or residential job.
Reviews, reviews, reviews!
Having an easy place for your clients to leave reviews is an important step when creating a successful plumbing, heating or HVAC website. Most customers these days will read other reviews before hiring a business for service. Many people like to leave reviews and photos because they know it will help future customers when making a decision to hire a company. Reviews are a great way to boost your company’s legitimacy on Google.
Photography
Including personalized photography really increases a website’s credibility. Having photos of your business, vans or trucks including your logo, your staff members, or past and future projects your company has completed will have your website show up as more trustworthy. This shows Google and customers your plumbing, heating or HVAC business is more credible, therefore increasing the websites score. An additional tip is constantly adding more photos, or atleast keeping the photos up to date.
Town Specific Landing Pages
Now that your website has your service area and core services outlined, it is a great idea to have town specific landing pages. A landing page is designed to convert visitors into leads for your plumbing, heating or HVAC business. When a customer searches for your services in Google and then follows it up with their town of residence, if you have a town specific landing page built out, your website will be one of the first to show up! For instance, if someone searches for “HVAC Dover, NH”, and your service area includes Dover, NH, and there is a specific landing page built out by your business for that town, you will drastically increase the chances you will appear high within Google for that search.
Updates
Your plumbing, heating or HVAC website needs to be constantly updated. Continuous updates allow customers to have more trust in the information and the business. This can include promotions or discounts on certain items (like water heaters or boilers), phone number changes, holiday closings, hourly changes, or project updates. In the end it will prevent less customer confusion and more customer conversions.
Conclusion
So, the point of building your website associated with your plumbing, heating or HVAC company is to have those visitors turn into customers. The goal is to build a trustworthy relationship with your customers and give them all the information they would need to understand your plumbing, heating or HVAC company’s services. While building out your website, if you follow these tips, your site will be extremely credible, reliable and increase it’s legitimacy. Not only scoring high with customers, but scoring high with Google as well, which will force Google to have your website as one of the top search results every time.
