7 Biggest Mistakes Landscapers Are Making with Their Websites
You’ve taken the plunge and either designed your own website or hired a company to build a site for your landscaping business. You’ve recognized that having a website is vital to your marketing plan. Great! But there are some common pitfalls landscapers make that can keep your website from bringing you business. Here are the seven most common mistakes — avoiding these will help boost your rankings and improve your customer conversion rate.
Mistake #1: A confusing or unattractive website
Most potential clients make a decision on whether or not to consider you for a job within 10 seconds of coming to your site. If you’ve got a site design that’s dated, cluttered, or confusing, you’re much more likely to lose a customer than to gain one. Take a moment to review your site: does your navigation make sense? Are your colors and fonts aesthetically pleasing and easy to read? Does your site feel modern and fresh or does it feel dated and old?
Ideally, you want your website to feel modern, clean, and attractive. Using high-quality photos of your work, ensuring your navigation is clear and concise, and making sure all of your contact information is available for a customer will greatly increase your chances of customer conversion.
Mistake #2: A non-responsive website
As more and more people are viewing websites from mobile devices and tablets, it’s become more and more important to ensure your website is responsive. If you have a non-responsive website that means it doesn’t automatically resize to fit the screen your potential customer is viewing your site on. It makes it much harder for your customer to navigate your site, and this causes people to leave almost immediately. Make sure your site is responsive, so that you can draw in as many customers as possible.
Mistake #3: No calls to action
If your site doesn’t include any calls to action — instructions for potential customers to call you for an appointment, fill out a form for a free quote, etc. — you’re making it much harder to easily bring them to your business. Providing a phone number that’s click-to-call or a simple form that gives you their name, number, and email ensures that you’ll have that customer’s information, or that they have an easy way to contact you. You should ideally have a call to action linked to an offer on every page of your website. For example: “Call now for your FREE landscaping estimate: 123-456-7890” would tell a customer an immediate benefit of contacting you and give them a way to do so immediately.
Mistake #4: No pictures of your work
As a landscaper, a potential customer is searching for examples of previous projects to see the kind of quality of work you can provide. If you only use stock images on your site, and don’t have any examples of your work, there is little incentive for them to choose you. After all, you’re not providing them with any sort of foundation to believe you’ll give them what they’re looking for. Take a few minutes at the end of every job to snap a few high-quality digital photos, then make sure they’re optimized for your site so that they don’t take forever to load. You’ll give yourself an edge over your competition by compiling a portfolio displaying your work.
Mistake #5: Non-obvious contact information
No customer is going to take the time to scour your website for contact information. If your contact information is not immediately obvious, that customer is going to leave your site and find someone who can be easily reached. Make sure you have a contact page or, at the very least, a prominently displayed phone number or contact form. This very simple detail can improve your customer conversion almost immediately!
Mistake #6: No testimonials or reviews
Customers rely increasingly on testimonials and reviews to help them choose which landscaper to pick for their residential or commercial needs. If your site has no testimonials or reviews, then your potential customer doesn’t have any reliable proof that your other customers are happy with your work. Whether you take reviews left on Facebook and include them on your site or encourage your current clients to leave you reviews in-office or through a form on your website, including positive testimonials throughout your site creates a sensation of trustworthiness. A customer is more likely to work with you if they feel they can trust you to be professional and do a satisfactory job.
Mistake #7: Not using Search Engine Optimization, or SEO
In the past, you used to be able to stuff your site with keywords to ensure you were highly ranked on Google. However, those times are over, and you need to ensure that your website is optimized for Google’s search engine. This can take a lot of work, but involves having descriptive and accurate page names, ensuring your NOB — Name of Business — is somewhere on every page, using meta tags and titles, and so much more.
Confused? Check out our SEO for Construction Companies, Defined blog. Though targeted towards construction companies, the information there is helpful for you, too!
These are the top 7 mistakes most landscaping websites make. If you can avoid these pitfalls, you can improve your chance of attracting potential customers to your website. And, more importantly, you’ll be able to increase your chances of actually generating leads and getting new customers for your business.
If you have more questions, or want to talk to a professional about how to best market your business, why not head over to Contractor Dynamics and shoot us a message? We’re more than happy to help you improve your website and increase your earnings!
You can also check out some relevant blogs, such as Choosing the Right Words for your Contractor Marketing and How to Get a Google Star Rating in Search Results. Both of these blogs provide you with valuable information that can help you vastly improve your website and your general marketing plan. Good luck!
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