Well, hello and welcome to Tradie Tuesday. It doesn’t feel like Tuesday because we’ve only just come back the Easter holiday, but alas, it is Tuesday.
What I’ve got is a checklist for your website, so basically eight things. Is it 8 things that you can do for your website whether you’ve got a website and you need to review it or you’re about to purchase a website and you’ve basically been told by your web developer that you need to go and get your content and then come back to us. Kill me. Your site’s never going to launch. I can tell you that right now.
Yeah, it’s basically a checklist to help you move the needle forward and make you think about it from a marketing perspective if, yeah, you haven’t had a chance to think about that because obviously, why would you? You’re busy doing what you need to do rather than what I’m doing here. All right, cool. Your homepage is checklist number one. You want to make sure that your homepage is a roundabout.
Before we even start, if you’ve got welcome to JB Plumbing or whatever it is, you got to get rid of that welcome message because it’s not 1999, and you no longer need to welcome people to your website. People just go to your website and they need action. They want to get in there straightaway and start looking at what you do and learning about you as quickly as possible, all right? First things first, get rid of that welcome note.
Now, next thing is with the homepage. It’s a roundabout. That means that people need to come into the site, and they need to move around. This is fun. They need to move around depending on what you want to do. For example, if you sell box drains or, I don’t know, roof refitting or there’s a … I don’t know. Gosh. If you’re an electrician, you got to do lights or you got to do floor heating, for example. You get them on your homepage and you say, you break your business down into the four most profitable pieces. Those four pieces then can be clicked on and send someone out to that separate page.
Rather than just having a homepage that’s got everything on it, you want them to be able to go, “Ah, heated flooring. Great idea.” It’s coming into cooler months now, so it’s going to be very important. They get off the homepage and they get onto a page that’s more important for them and then, you can try and close them there, so very important that your website is a roundabout, and they move around your site and off your homepage as quickly as possible.
Number two is your services page. Each service needs its own page. Now, I so commonly see this. You cannot have a services page that says, “Hey, 24/7 electrical services company. We do this, this, this, this, this.” It’s like a big list. You cannot do that. You are never going to rank for any of those individual services if they’re all on their own page. Even like me, if I want to rank for websites or my Tradie marketing or, I don’t know, other things I’m marketing for … Shh, don’t tell anyone. Then, I need to have a page on those things.
Like you, if you, again, want to rank for heated flooring, you need a page on that. It’s not just a services page that sort of tells the story of who you are. Your services page can’t just have like a whole bunch of bullet points. I mean, sure it can, but each one of those items need to break off into their own individual page. That’s the only way you’re going to get ranked for this stuff. Simple.
All right, social media icons. First things first, if your social media cons are sitting at the very top of your website or if someone’s designing them to the very front of your website, you need to cut that straightaway. Social media icons are basically a distraction because everyone loves Facebook and all their friends are in there. It’s a record. Crazy. Excuse me. I’m going to run out of water soon. Social media icons, so first things first, you got to get them off the top of your website. Social media icons should be way down the bottom, way down the bottom. Yeah, that’s pretty simple.
All right, next one’s next. Local listings. This is such a big win. You’ve got to go to the Google Webmaster tools page. If you just Google Google My Business, you’ll find the free directory listing tool for Google My Business. Basically, it helps you get ranked in the local area. This is how people rank in the local pack. They have a Google My Business page. Not only do you have the ads, and we’ve done this before a couple weeks ago, the ads, and then the Google My Listing pack, and then all the SEOs down the bottom. It’s really important for you to grab … Oh, my God. So sorry. Really important for you to grab a Google My Listing page.
There’s people listening and I’m the yawning. This is horrible. I’m so sorry. All right. I’m going to get through this nice and quick. About page is … Whoa, I’m getting a bit of a duplicate there. Okay. Your next item is your About page, so do you have a story and do you have photos of yourself? I know you’re probably cringing with the fact that you don’t want to have photos of yourself on your website but people … I mean, I was talking to a lady this morning, a physio actually, and she was saying, “The first thing I do with any new tradie that’s fixing my house in Mossman actually …”
She calls him up, and she talks to them, and she understands who they are and what sort of business they’re running and just kind of like ask them a couple of questions because she’s about to leave her keys with you, and you need to be trustable. You need to be trustworthy. You’ve got to be good on the phone. What helps is that you and your team are on the About page so when you turn up in the morning to take those keys off that person, that you are the same, you’re the same person, you’re the same face. It’s trust-building. They get to know you by simply looking at all your stuff online.
Okay, calls to action. This is like one of the most overlooked pieces of … or, I could say tactics that are used on a website. Every single page has to have a call to action, so what does that mean? Again, on your About page, if you’re like saying, “Hey, this is what we do, and I love electrical and I’ve been doing this all my life, service, services, services, services,” what you can then do is go, “Do you need some assistance right now? If so, make sure you call me or email me.” It’s like straightaway, you’re asking for their business. You need to do that on every single page in order to spark someone’s interest or make them click and actually call you, all right? Calls to action.
Reporting, so this is pretty obvious, but when you build a website, there’s not often reporting even in the damn thing. Every website needs to be working on an app for the … but every website that we often see, it doesn’t have any reporting systems in it, so it’s very hard to even understand what’s going on. We always put Google Analytics in the back of the site because then that allows us to look at the site from a more reporting perspective and go, “Right. Where’s the traffic going?” It’s very, very important that you actually have some reports shooting out of your site. That way, you can sort of make some better decisions and not just assumptions.
All right. My very last point here is tell stories, so build a blog that’s worth reading about or in your social media, build a story. I am stalking right now a very awesome plumber in Sydney and his whole Instagram is about him getting up on the roofs and checking the guttering and looking at pipes and just all the things, as a customer, you wonder what they’re getting up to. This guy’s actually showing you. He’s building story and he’s showing rapport, and he’s actually building trust because I know when he’s in a job.
I mean, sure, he’s doing a little bit of Instagramming. I don’t mind. He’s actually looking at all the damn pipes and seeing where they’re going and analyzing all this stuff, and I’m going to be able to see all that in my place, so it’s very important that you build a story. You can also do that on the blog. Really, this guy should be taking all that content that’s on his Instagram and building a blog article on each home that he’s looking at because that would be really good content.
All right, so that is my eight-point checklist. I hope this was of interest to you. I’m going to leave a link in the YouTube channel, so you can download this. Okay, adios. It’s Steph from Tradies Get Online. Ciao.
