Get Your Contractor Website to the Top of Search Engines

If you want the website for your contracting company to rank number one in search engines and you're in a large metro area, you may face a lot of competition. But there's more than one way to skin a cat. You may find that it's faster to rank high on search terms like "kitchen update" and "room addition" than for "general contractor." Or for an electrician, the focus might be on "house rewire" rather than "electrician." The electrician may have the longer term goal of ranking high on "electrician," but in the meantime he can gain visibility for his website with less fought-over keywords. The strategy he needs is creating "landing pages."

Creating Landing Pages

Creating landing pages is an excellent way to add useful pages to a website. Here's how it works. Let's say that you're a general contractor who finds bathroom remodels profitable. You can create a special page for bathroom remodels. It can show photos of your jobs or photos of the types of designs customers can choose from.

The Website Visitor Bounce Rate

The Website Visitor Bounce Rate

The Bounce Rate (or Exit Rate) measures the quality of traffic and how well that traffic is attracted to your Website. A low Exit Rate, followed by a high rate of conversion from visitor to customer is the ideal.

There are two definitions of the Exit Rate:

    The percentage of visitors who arrive and leave a Website immediately.

    The percentage of visitors that visit just one page on a website.

The two measurements give slightly different results.

How to Market Your Small Business Part 1

I get asked this a lot, from clients who are interested in marketing their business online, but just aren't sure how to get started.
Example: there's a local restaurant that I eat at from time to time, because they have the best burgers I've ever tasted. Bar none. But no one. except the locals in this small town have ever heard of them, because... they don't market.

The owner and I started chatting, and she found out that I help businesses with online marketing, and her first question was, "How do you do it?"

That's a reasonable question from a busy business owner more interested in checking the fresh produce that came in that morning than learning the ins and outs of online marketing.

Please Don't Let Your Web Developer Write Your Content

One of the biggest mistakes that I've seen small (and mid-sized!) businesses make is to allow the person who creates that great-looking website to write their content fnr them.

Now, this is not a diatribe against web developers. I happen to like them, and work with several. But unless your website designer happens to also be a gifted copywriter (and this is rare), you'll get a great site and mediocre content.

Most website designers know a little SEO. They can create titles (sort of), keywords, and metadescriptions.

But you could be cheating yourself if you let someone who doesn't understand the psychology of sales, or how to motivate people how to click on link, or fill out a form do your writing for you.