If you’ve ever done any type of digital marketing or sales for your Restoration Company then you already know that attention equals $$. It just makes sense, right? For your website, more traffic leads to more eyeballs on your business, which should lead to more leads. But what happens when it doesn’t? What happens when your web traffic is increasing month over month, but that traffic isn’t leading to calls? Obviously, you fire your marketing agency and hire another right? While that mentality is common and, in some respects, makes sense, it typically doesn’t solve your core problem.
Well, my friends, today I am here to tell you that you have a conversion issue and increasing your conversion rates on your website and Google Business Profile is the only solution.
Let’s stop thinking in terms of your industry, let’s say you sell a widget. When you first opened your business, you would see 50 new people every month in your store and out of that 50 people, 10 buy a widget, a 20% conversion rate. So, you hire a marketing agency to help increase the traffic to your store. After a few short months, you are seeing 200 people each month, a HUGE increase in traffic! But, despite that massive traffic increase, you only sell 30 widgets, which means your conversion rate has decreased to around 15%. So, you fire the marketing agency and hire the next guy who cold called you telling you that they can increase your sales with more traffic. Again, the traffic into your store increases to 300 people per month, but you still only sell 40 widgets; not good enough. What do you do? You’ve increased traffic but still no sales. The people are coming in, but not buying. Your product is amazing, so it isn’t that. You then look at your business from the perspective of your customers and notice a few problems with your store that are making it tough for people to buy and difficult to understand what your widget does. Then you notice one of your salespeople ignoring a customer or being rude! You have identified three key areas that are hurting your sales:
- People don’t understand exactly what your widget does
- It is difficult to find the correct widget
- Your salespeople are not great with the customers.
Is the answer to send more traffic and ignore your shortcomings? NO! You need to optimize your business to capitalize on the traffic you already have.
You make some changes to the inside of the store to help people understand what your widget does, added some things that would help them easily make a purchase, like accepting credit cards and hired salespeople that would be attentive and helpful to the customers and BOOM! After making those subtle tweaks to the inside of your store, you sold 100 widgets the next month! And when you look at how many people came into the store you are surprised to find out that you had less traffic this month, about 250 people, a 40% conversion rate!
Without an increase in foot traffic, you’ve increased your conversion rate by 25%.
The same thing happens with your Restoration Business. Send all the traffic in the world to your website but if it’s not built to convert, that traffic is worthless.
If you want to increase the conversions to your website you need to ensure you’re following the conversion best practices.
Have a professional looking website: Your website is the hub of all the information and the digital funnel for your online leads. Make sure your website clearly reflects the type of business you run. Clean, fast, professional websites convert at a much higher rate than something your neighbor’s friend’s nephew threw together for you 5 years ago. Not only that, but your rankings on Google are affected by user experience and page speed; Include plenty of clickable call now buttons and a contact form for people to reach you. Look at your current website vs your competition – does it accurately reflect your business? Make sure your website is up to par. Remember, first impressions last.
Mobile first design: Google switched to mobile first indexing a few years ago, so if your website isn’t mobile friendly, you won’t show up in search. Not only that, but most of the web traffic, especially for the home services industry, is coming from a mobile device. This means you MUST have a mobile friendly website if you want to compete. Making it easy to get in touch with you via your mobile website is crucial, so a prominently displayed CALL NOW button a user can click will significantly increase your conversions.
Make it easy to get in touch: In this microwave society we live in, it’s important to get right to the point. If someone finds your website via a web search, then there’s a good chance they need your services. Remember, people who have suffered property damage have an immediate need in most cases. Don’t make it difficult to reach you, put a clickable phone number in the header of your website and sprinkle it throughout.
Make it easy to understand what you do and where you do it: Make sure your homepage’s above the fold information clearly states what it is that you do, what areas you serve, and how to get in touch.
Enable Live Chat and Call Tracking: If you really want to get a handle on your lead follow up then enable a live chat function on your website and get set up with call tracking. These two features will give you a real time snapshot of your incoming leads, how they’re followed up with, and how fast they’re responded to. Make sure that if you’re going to have these features then you must have the resources in place to answer chats and return calls immediately.
There are a few other tricks you can implement to help increase your online conversions to your Restoration company, but if you follow the guidelines, I mentioned above you should start to see some steady increases. Remember, when it comes to digital marketing, the changes you make can take some time to bear fruit. Don’t get frustrated, just monitor your analytics and your calls and you will begin to see the big picture of traffic and conversions.
Benjamin Ricciardi is the founder of 
