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Generating traffic for your website is a key component of building your client base and increasing awareness of your business. By attracting a high amount of traffic to your website, you increase the number of people that are exposed to your business and the services you offer, thus increasing your chances of generating potential leads.
Let's briefly do the calculations together!
Example:
Say your landscaping business needs $3,000 per month to stay in operation with current costs.
If each customer is worth approximately $250 for the services you render per month, you need approximately 12 customers per month to meet your $3,000 benchmark.
Taking a conservative approach, if you have an average 2% conversion rate from website visitor to lead, you will receive approximately 1 lead for every 100 site visitors. However, the conversion rate is much much higher for referral leads, which convert 30% better than leads generated from other marketing channels. Most of your leads will likely be referral leads from existing customers in your geographic area. This means that to get 12 new customers, you will only need roughly 36 website visitors!
This should help you to understand the role of website traffic in the financial success of your home service business.
There are a multitude of ways that you can increase your website traffic, but figuring out where to start may feel like guesswork. That's why we have created this simple guide that outlines some of the major steps you can take to generate more website traffic for your home service business.
Advertisement
One of the more obvious avenues of generating website traffic is through thoughtfully designed advertising campaigns. These can take a variety of forms from physical flyers, to yard signs, to online search ads.
Free
Who doesn’t love free advertising? Take advantage of free advertising opportunities that may come your way in the form of past and present client relationships.
If you feel that there are clients that you have particularly good standing with, you can reach out to see if they would be willing to leave a review for you online. It’s been shown that positive reviews make your website more alluring to browsing consumers, which results in higher traffic to your site. If you are unsure of how to go about asking for a review, just follow along with our how to guide!
Another more or less free option is to ask clients if they would be willing to post a small sign for your business in their front yard in exchange for a discount. Having your sign posted in a client’s yard not only gives you credibility if you are a landscaping service (you can get direct credit for your good work on display!), but may makes potential clients feel more trusting towards your home service business as they already know someone personally who utilizes your services. Just be sure that you have your website displayed somewhere easy to spot on the sign so potential customers will have a way to reach you and learn more about your business.
Paid
There are multiple routes to take if you have a bit more in your budget and are looking to have a broad reaching advertising campaign. We give an in depth overview of various paid advertising methods in our handbook for starting or growing your cleaning business, which is applicable to all home service businesses. You can break advertising down most easily into two categories, physical advertising materials and online advertising. Physical advertising includes direct mail postcards, door hangers, flyers, wrapping your vehicle, etc. Online advertising includes Google Local Service ads, banner ads, paid Facebook and Instagram ads, partnerships with social media personalities, etc. These various forms of online advertising range in price and can quickly add up, so it's important to set a firm budget ahead of time and measure how well your advertising campaign is doing at drawing traffic to our site.
The Power of Social media
Social media is your best friend when it comes to drawing traffic to your site, both paid and free. Having a strong presence on social media can add credibility to your business, gives you the opportunity to connect directly with customers, and provides another platform where you can add a direct link to your website that potential customers can click on. A couple of the essential social media sites to develop a presence on are Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Additionally, sites like pinterest can also help to develop a loyal brand following.
If you are interested in top-notch quality content for your business but don't have the design background or time to spend on creating it, check out ProPhone’s custom package which includes personalized marketing graphics for social media channels.
According to Growth Badger, In almost every industry, Facebook still sends more traffic than all other social networks.This means that if you don’t yet have a facebook business profile, it’s time to take action! You can follow our simple guide on how to set up your facebook business page HERE. In terms of creating attractive content for facebook, you need to first start with the basics that allow customers to easily identify your brand, your services offered, and an easy way to contact you. This means adding your website first and foremost, which can be done in the “manage” section of your facebook business page. Like other largely visual channels of social media such as instagram, you want to make sure that your brand image is both professional and easily recognizable. This means putting your brand identity front and center using a professional profile photo and cover picture. When deciding which photos to use, keep in mind the message you want to send about your home service business. Are you family owned? Do you specialize in a particular type of cleaning? Is your company very involved with the local community? If you are family owned for example, you might want to include a professional photo of your family in company shirts.
Putting your logo front and center is also an important way to differentiate yourself from the crowd and ensure customers remember you. If you have a professional logo, you may want to choose that for your profile image, and if you don't, consider getting one designed.
Another key component for maintaining a competitive Facebook business page is keeping it regularly updated with photos of your best work and news about business successes.
Instagram is best described as the more visually appealing twin to facebook. Presence on both of these platforms is important because studies have shown that each platform tends to attract a different age audience. The way Instagram displays your posts is in a 3 square wide grid that shows all of your posts as images next to one another. When a user clocks on one image, they can then read the associated caption. Due to its visual nature, this means that first impressions are critical and that your post needs to be able to catch viewers attention enough to want to read the caption underneath. A good approach to take with Instagram is to choose a particular color theme and style of posts that will keep your account consistent and professional looking (example below). You want to provide a mix of informational content, photos of your work, and relatable or humorous content such as memes relating to your field of business. Don’t forget to provide a link to your home service business website by clicking on the “edit profile” button on the top of your homepage and then copy and pasting in your website URL.
If you need advice on how to create professional posts or if you would like someone else to handle this aspect of social media outreach, feel free to get in touch with a ProPhone team member who would be happy to assist!
Tik Tok
A great way to engage with potential clients (and have fun doing it) is to create a TikTok account. TikTok is a social media platform where users share short videos set to music. TikTok is one of the most downloaded apps in 40+ countriesand can help you make a more organic first impression compared with traditional forms of marketing and promotion. TikTok offers both organic growth opportunities and paid advertising opportunities. Unlike instagram or Facebook, your content for TikTok does not need to be as polished. Instead, it must simply have some sort of entertainment appeal wether it be telling the story of how you started your company, a humorous day on the job, or a before and after video of the job site. Avoid coming off as too salesperson-like in and instead focus on adding value to your viewers.
Twitter is a great platform to provide short updates for your home service business and productively engage with potential clients. It's important to remember that this account represents your business not your personal interests, so refrain from commenting on potentially divisive issues. On twitter, it's important to keep in mind that all tweets are public by default, so what you say will have an impact on your business. You can find people in your industry by choosing interests related to your field of work when setting up your account. You want to also be sure to include your website in your twitter bio as well as a brief description of your business services. Unlike facebook, twitter is about “following” as opposed to “friending” other accounts, which means that you can begin exploring the content of other accounts and they can begin exploring yours right away without waiting for approval.
Pinterest or similar sites such as Hometalk and Dudepins allow you to post and curate boards of images that other viewers may find helpful or attractive. You can create a “pin” by uploading an image and adding a title, description, and website link. This is an easy way to potentially get more traffic for your website by creating a direct link between images that others see and your website URL. Images that you post should be high-quality and reflect your business area. For example, if you have a landscaping business, you may want to upload professional-looking photos of home gardens you have created or well maintained yards. You can save pins and then organize them into your own “boards”, or curated collections of images, based on theme.
Pinterest cna be incredibly effective for attracting organic traffic to your site because people are more likely to want to see more of your work and what services you have to offer when they are already interested in something you have shared. In fact, according to Pinterest Business, 85% of weekly US Pinners have made a purchase based on Pins from brands.
Make sure your site is fast and responsive!
It's a no brainer that having a site that loads quickly and is easy to interact with will help to keep clients on your page longer. No one wants to wait for ages for a slow website that may or may not offer them the service they are seeking. For help creating a site that both loads quickly and is intuitive to interact with, reach out the the ProPhone team today!
Join the conversation
As we previously mentioned, twitter and other online discussion forums such as reddit are a great way to add value to potential clients and It’s been shown that Reddit drives over 3 times as much traffic as YouTube. This means that engaging in industry relevant conversation forums are a key aspect of driving traffic to your website. You can easily find nearly any avenue of industry related conversation by doing a quick search in your browser for “(insert industry) reddit forum”. A good way to go about engaging in conversation on these platforms is to provide value to other users that relates to the conversation at hand. For example, if a user is wondering what type of flowers they should plant for blooms in late july and you are a landscaping pro, you can politely respond to their question with your advice. You can also generate conversation that relates to your industry by posing a question of your own or posting a funny industry-related meme. You can then turn conversation into traffic for your website by telling people to reach out if they have further questions or would like to connect and then providing your website URL for them to do so.
Position yourself in the industry
Everyone is more likely to engage the services of someone they trust to be an expert in their field. Even if you have an excellent eye for landscaping potential or have 20+ years of cleaning experience, it’s important to make sure that these skills you bring to the table are widely understood. You can establish yourself as a leader within your industry by attending industry conferences or hosting specific webinars. At conferences you will have the opportunity to network and engage with other professionals in your industry and hand out business cards that contain your website information. This will help you to achieve more credibility in your field in general and can help you stay up with the latest industry knowledge. You can leverage conferences and other events into marketing and social media content that may drive website traffic by doing video logs that cover your experience at the conference and including photos of your business’s booth etc.
If you still have questions about how to increase your website traffic or want to learn more about one of the options listed in this blog, get in touch with a ProPhone team member today!
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