Next to you, your service-based business website is likely your most important marketing tool. It should provide prospects with information about the services you offer, build trust in your expertise and, most importantly, provide an easy way for prospects to contact you and hire your services. By implementing the five in-bound marketing tips that follow to your service-based business website, you can be assured that your website is working around the clock to help your business succeed.
1. Include a call to action on every page
A call to action (or CTA) is a concise statement, graphic, button, form or banner that prompts your website visitor to act. Depending on your ultimate goal, examples of CTAs may include:
- A request to fill out a simple contact form to schedule an appointment
- An invitation to provide a name and email for a mailing list
- A directive to call a phone number
- A suggestion to click for a special offer
Essentially, you are telling the visitor what to do next. A CTA should be included on every page of your website.
Examples of effective CTAs include:
- Sign up to receive a copy of our free report
- Interested in learning more? Fill out our form
- Ready to begin? Call us for a free consultation at 908.219.4703
- Sign up now for our new client special email promotion.
2. Be clear about your service area
Do you service a specific geographic area? Do you make any exceptions? It’s important to be clear about your service area for several reasons:
It will save you time: identifying your service area will filter out inquiries that are not appropriate for your business.
It will save you money: targeted online advertising in your service area means that you only targeting customers in the areas that you serve.
It will help your search engine optimization (SEO): identifying specific towns and regions on your website (ideally with individual pages) can increase your page rank when your potential customers are searching for services in their town.
3. Include your phone number on every page
Don’t bury your contact information! Make it as easy as possible for prospects to contact your business. Your phone number should be positioned in the same spot on every page of your website. This could be at the top, in a sidebar or at the footer of each page.
4. Include an email sign up bar
If someone visiting your website is not ready to purchase your services, give them the simple option to stay in touch. You may want to offer a subscription to a company newsletter, a free product or service guide, or an invitation to receive special offers.
Naturally, you’d rather have their business right away. So consider offering an incentive to purchase via a new customer promotion. Anything you can do to turn potential customers into paying customers is well worth trying; and incentives are often a good place to start.
5. Provide an easy-to-complete form to help visitors schedule appointments or request quotes
It’s a good idea to provide several ways for customers (and potential customers) to contact your business. Whether you add an appointment scheduler or quote request form (or both) they allow your customers to fill out the form at their leisure (or in the middle of the night when you may not be picking up the phone). Keep your form simple. You want to collect just enough information so that you can respond to their request. Above your form, and in your submission confirmation email back to the customer, include a time frame for when they can expect to hear back from you (e.g. 3-5 hours or next business day).
Is your service-based business website utilizing the tools we’ve outlined above? If not, the website marketing experts at Trillion can help create a highly effective, lead-generating website for your service-based business. Give us a call at 908.219.4703 or click here to use our contact form. Getting started is that easy!
