Your Buildings Perform. Does Your Website?
An online presence has become as standard a tool for home performance businesses as having a blower door. While many still remain unaware of the whole house approach to comfort, energy efficiency and safety, homeowners are using the internet to find solutions to their home’s pain points -- mold, high energy bills, cold floors, etc.
To reach these homeowners, you need to both provide solutions to these problems and make sure that homeowners researching them are able to find you. Your website is the first place they turn to get an idea of who you are, what you do and whether you are the right guy or gal for the job. Consequently, how you distinguish your website from the competition’s is what separates the wheat from the chaff, and is what will drive traffic and produce leads you can convert. The two most important ways to do this are:
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Increase Traffic: Make sure people can find your website (and that they get to yours before they get to your competition’s).
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Optimize for Conversion: Make sure people have a positive experience while they’re visiting your website, so they’ll schedule an appointment with you rather than going back to the search engine to look for another company.
The purpose of this three-part whitepaper is to give you a clear, concise guide to the basics of making your website work for your business. In this second installment, we’ll examine strategies for optimizing the user’s experience on your website.
Part 1 of our whitepaper looks at fundamentals of search engine optimization (SEO), while Part 3 discusses how website analytics are a key tool to measure your success and provide ideas for improvement.
While this is intended primarily for HVAC and home performance contractors, energy auditors, energy raters, and other residential energy efficiency professionals, the principles we espouse are fairly universal, and may be useful for a wide range of businesses looking to improve their website performance.